black friday

Tis the season to spend! No better way to do it then to head to the States for the Black Friday sales. Tracey and I embarked on this expedition at 4am Friday morning. My mom came with us as well. We wanted to get across the borders before they became busy. The Seattle Premium Outlet mall had opened at midnight so Carol had been there a few hours before us.

Carol was still in line at the Coach store when she called me. She waited 2 hours in the cold to get through. I wasn't interested in high end items and was on the lookout for the "steals". Tracey and I shopped from 6am to 8pm. We went to Seattle Premium, another Outlet mall for some shoes at Nine West and then to Bellis Fair as the radio said that the waiting time for north bound traffic was 3 hours. We were exhausted and lacked food - so we ate the yucky food court stuff again. My poor mom reached her shopping max about 2 hours into the game. She gave up and waited in the food court for us. I think she sat in the food court for 6 hours before we circled back to get her. Tracey and I found that the deals that were to be had were for guys clothing. So Shawn and Chicky scored big and they weren't even there! We ran into Chris, Cindy and Toshiki at the Banana Republic store hours later. By that time the crazy deals were most over and the lines weren't so bad. What we discovered late in the game was the VIP Coupon book extra discounts that could have been applied to the sales ones. Duh - we only managed to get reimbursed at Banana Republic (with Tracey's stealthy management skills) for the difference. I was quite surprised as Tracey's assertiveness and persistence. Lol - I thought it would have to be me that would have to put on the "difficult customer" hat today. It was funny watching as a bystander for once. We pissed off some people though as we got this done at the counter and stirred up some commotion as we had to get the management involved. Persistence prevailed and we got our stuff refunded/rescanned on the spot - thus barging infront of the super long lines. GAP wasn't so flexible and insisted that we wait at the end of the line if we wanted to refund/rebuy our stuff with the extra discounts. We weighed the costs/benefits for GAP and figured the savings weren't as worth while. Those line ups went around the whole store. Not to mention the evil glares from patrons who have been standing in line for over 1/2 hour was troubling. :-)

Getting back across the border was a pain. We had a group guard who banished us to the declaration line. Tracey and I had a lot of stuff and we declared it all - wasn't about to lie about our purchases as it wasn't worth the hassle. Feeling depressed about having to pay taxes/duty on our goods, we lined up in the mega line at customs. Due to Canada having not enough staff, a border guard lady came up to us in line and asked us what we bought. We told her 90% mens clothing as gifts. She looked at our bills, took our border ticket from us and told us to go home. Whoopee!!! We were spared! Excited we ran back to the car and scuttled home.