The Black Friday sales

Good morning all you early birds and happy Black Friday. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving yesterday. For us in this house, our Thanksgiving has been postponed until Dec. 7 due to our oldest son being sick with a bug. We were going to host our family, you may remember my post about that, and we had to tell them all not to come. Disappointing certainly, but all my baking is currently chilling in our big freezer and I can pull it back out next week. 

If you're like me, you got up early this morning after staying up late last night. Or maybe you're one of those extra-hearty souls who never went to bed at all! I was up until about 12:30am last night. Rumor all week long was that Zumba was going to be doing a Black Friday sale. Then, yesterday morning, I get a nifty little "Happy Thanksgiving" email from Zumba which included an ad for their sale. Yay! The rumors were true! Hooray! Of course, rumor also had it that Zumba's Black Friday sales have typically caused massive slow-downs, even crashes, on their site due to the increased traffic. Basically, the advice was: If at first you can check out, try try again! I already had an idea of what I wanted and I was in and out with my two things by 12:08. Though it did take me three tries to get one of the items into the cart, so the scuttlebutt was right about the traffic issues. So why was I up until 12:30am if I was done with the sale by 12:08? Because I monitoring my washing machine. I wanted to make sure our oldest son's extra sheets and PJ's got into the dryer in case they were needed in the middle of the night (they were...at about 3am). Oh the joys of a sick child. Anyways, what were my two things?

1) The purple wrap jacket:

The El Fab Futuro Jacket in Cut N' Paste Purple

Remember this little beauty? I gave it some love in one of my previous posts. It's from the new Gold Collection. I got it for $39.00 (originally $49.00).

2) An instructor tank top:

The Instructing And Beyond Racerback in Zumba Green

I thought I was going to buy the black one (that I mentioned in my post), also from the Gold Collection, but then I saw this. This wasn't up on the site a day ago. I guess for Black Friday, Zumba puts up merchandise they've previously taken out of the shop. This tank top was $6.99 (originally $20.00), instead of $16.00 (originally $20.00) for the black one I was looking at initially. This thing was a steal! So I am satisfied. I'm also out of gift card money. At least for now, Christmas is coming...

Yesterday afternoon, I went out to my local Meijer to buy the big Thursday newspaper with all the Black Friday ads. The kindly woman greeting people in the doorway told me that they had sold out of them hours and hours earlier. Sigh. She politely suggested that I check at the Walgreen's down the road and, as it turned out, they still had tons and tons. Go figure. So I spent part of the afternoon perusing to see if there was anything worth getting up early for. I don't go out every year. I have see something that makes the trip worthwhile. But this year I did, at Toys R Us and Kohl's.

Stop 1 - Toys R Us:

6 Case LEGO Workstation

Mega Bloks 80-Piece Big Building Bag Classic

We've got a couple of "builder-boys" in our house so these are going to make a couple of great Christmas presents. The workstation is a bonus for the Zumbamommy as it will keep the boy's Lego's better organized.

Stop 2 - Kohl's:

Bry happened to notice a couple of good deals on some PJ bottoms in the Kohl's ad. The microfleece pants were $4.99 (regularly $24.00) and the flannel pants were $9.99 (regularly $24.00). At those prices, I got him a couple pairs of each!

Stop 3 - Teavana (in the mall):
Not exactly a Black Friday destination, I was just in the neighborhood. I'm a huge tea drinker and this is where I buy my Jasmine Dragon green tea. They -were- running a sale today on their holiday blends (50% off), but since I have to be in just the right mood for one of the "specialteas", I didn't think that was worth it. I have some Spiced Apple Cider roobois already, one holiday blend is enough.

So, that was my Black Friday adventure. It was fun today, and it will be fun again in a little less than a month from now when our boys are opening their building sets on Christmas day.

Best advice: From my experience, and this is only my fourth Black Friday so I'm not exactly a veteran here, pre-planning is utterly essential.
*  Decide exactly what you want ahead of time and bring the ad with you so that you can show the workers the picture when you get there.
*  If you're making multiple stops, try to map out a route if possible. Some deals are more "time-sensitive" than others, so you'll want to make those first priority.
*  Have a Plan B in place in case you get there too late, these things happen sometimes.