Last weekend was the first long weekend I didn't go anywhere out of state. With an eye on optimal spending and another on possible shopping I decided to spend 4 days at home. Come Thanksgiving and there was a buzz among all my friends here. Everyone started planning for shopping on Black Friday. They checked out the deals, identified the shops and mapped out the strategies. I had only one item in mind, an external harddrive for my laptop. So I didn't bother at first. Then the enthusiam caught on and by 9 o'clock at night, I was cruising from shop to shop, checking out the queues. All my friends were dispersed in various shops. Best Buy offered laptops at $ 249 and $379, a steal! My friend who went at 2 in the afternoon was not the first in the queue. One of our brethren beat him to it. The time I went, it had swollen into a 70 + strong queue with still 7 cold hours to go.
To cut the long story short, I took position at another store and joined the fun of waiting. What started out as a plan for an external harddrive ended up with me getting that, a thumb drive, SD card, camera, surgeguard, Ferrari toy car with remote, Microsoft Flight simulator, some more toys, some jewellery (silver chain and strands of pearls), blank DVDs and some more! By evening, I was driving like a zombie checking out shops. I got some things for my friends who stood at other stores and they got me some other things which I couldn't get. Quite a bit of shopping! :-)
This led to me thinking what if this happens in India. With Walmart about to open shops in India with a tie up with Bharti, this looks very much possible. But things will be pretty much different.
1. Queue will start 100 hours before, not a mere 20 hours.
2. Queue positions will be sold.
3. The store will get calls from bureaucratic highups asking those deep discount items be allocated to them.
4. All tenous connections with the store employees will be recalled and friendships emphasized.
5. Fistfights will be common. In US too, this occurs at places.
6. Political TV channels will blame each other for the possible riots that will happen. They will shove a mike at some bleeding loser and let him have his 10 seconds of fame.
Thank God we don't have this Black Friday concept. As it is, the Deepavali shopping spread over 2,3 weeks makes everyone crazy. A special sale concentrated on a single day will bring the nation to a boil.
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10 comments:
Funny post. I can well imagine what it would be like in India :)
Just one question: the silver chain and pearls were for....? Do I hear wedding bells or something? :))
In India people wont queue... there will be more 100 hours waiting. It will all be by brute force and queue cutting. Settle it the primitive way.
@m - lol. You are imagining things. They are for friends and relatives.
@casa - Possible.
@oliveoyl - Exaggeration? I don't think so. These kind of things do happen.
Congrats on your hoard! yes, "these kinds" of things are already happening, why I even remember hearing a loong time ago when the U.S consulates did not have an appointment system in place, people had to line up outside the consulate at around 4 am in the morning if they hoped to make it in that day and ofcourse there were people you could pay to do that for you if you didn't want to get there that early, so,go figure!
I had so much fun on Black Friday going through website deals, I can imagine you must have had a blast :-)
People lineup to get the best of all. Its holiday season and not many delas are really worth buying. Somewhere ther is always a catch. Well in India most of the time you get discounts/sale due to different festivals. We have many shops all over the cities and people are not crazy like here to grab things. They usually double check and buy things out.
Here even after you buy, within 30-90 day period you return with your receipt. But in India you cannot do it for many things.
Its not a big deal in shopping in India as you get things all the year round.
@orchid - Consulates! Ah! that's a story in itself.
@janani - :-) you bet!
@priya - You may have a point there. But this concept of deep discounting for very limited quantities of a few products for only a very short time window, say 4 hours, has never been tested in India. To my knowledge. But India is a price oriented cash based economy while US is a quality oriented credit based economy.
Hmm quite a purchase. We went to Fry electronics once furing thanksgiving and that was the end of it, I dont have the patience to shop like that..
LOL on your imagination about what might happen in India...U missed adding that there would be a mobile tea kadai and snacks being sold for people in line!
The first time I saw the mad rush of people into stores on a BF on TV, I realised people are people everywhere whether they lived in developed/developing/under-developed countries!! Though it won't be long for these to be aped by the India retailers(mall, sale ellam dhaan vandhache!), kindergarden admission, metro water-kku adichukaradhu podhadha!!
OMG so true. 1 to 3 will definitely happen in India
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