My Black Friday Experience

As expected, Black Friday was full of ups and downs and many surprises. I am going to give a little recap without getting too specific as my children may be able to read this blog ;)
Black Friday started for me on Thanksgiving at approximately 2pm, we had spare time so we ran up to Old Navy and received the Black Friday deals early because I used my credit card. I got some deals there but nothing extremely exciting. Then after an interesting turkey dinner, I headed out around 9pm to Toys R Us. The crowd at Toys R Us was extreme and lead me to sit in my car for an hour and wait for the line to "go down." It eventually receded and we went in. Toys R Us has a line that is insane, both inside and outside the store. My best strategy is to get a cart (if you can) and just get in line. If you shop with someone else, you can leave the line to get what you need and bring it back. The line is so ridiculously long that everyone else ends up shopping in line and all of the door busters are in the isles anyway and you pass them. Now as Toys R Us has a large quantity of most of the door busters, if you want a popular item and are worried about losing out, I suggest getting it and then getting in line. Toys R Us was rather uneventful, I bought the box of Babies R Us diapers for $10 which was a pretty good deal, 96 diapers I think. But the strange part of that was these were size 3 and the size 2 had 76 diapers for $10?? Weird.
We then headed to Great Lakes Mall but this portion of my Black Friday experience definitely deserves it's own post so I will discuss it in a different post.
After the mall, we headed to Target around 2 or 3 am and it was CLEANED OUT! I was shocked. Not a door buster in site! And the line at Target was wrapped around the store, several hours after they opened. I was not interested in waiting in a Target line that would take several hours so we skipped out. I did happen to see Ulta bags and they had shampoo and conditioner in the ad that I was interested in. So we went over. They actually had the items that I was interested in but I was surprised to see that the weekly news-paper coupon ($3.50 off $10) excluded door busters?? This annoyed me but being prepared as I usually am, I happened to have an internet printable that worked so all was not lost.
So this concludes my early hour shopping with the exception of the mall which I will discuss in a more elaborate post shortly.