More Black Friday Tales.

There have been a lot of news stories about what happened on Black Friday. Probably the worst was a lady who used pepper spray on people at a Walmart in California to try and get an Xbox. There were scattered reports throughout the country about people being attacked in parking lots and a few other reports of violence that took place in stores during the sale. Obviously, people ignored the petitions that were trying to shame stores because they dared to open earlier. They are saying that sales this year were higher than they have ever been. That's really punishing those retailers and making the point about them ruining Thanksgiving. Look for next years sales to start even earlier.

I did have to deal with a couple people that didn't quite get the concept behind the Black Friday sales. The big sale items are limited quantities. One man asked me when we were going to get more of the laptop computers in and for that price and another made the comment that when we got more Xbox's in that he could get one for that Black Friday price. Neither one wanted to accept the answer that I gave them when I told them the items would no longer be available at that price. Last night we had a gentleman who came in who had bought one of the 40 inch television sets and the set was not working. The set had been purchased at another store in another state, and he wanted a replacement for that price. The only 40 inch TV that we carry sells for over $300 more than he paid for that particular set. He couldn't understand why we would not sell him the one we had in stock for that price since he had waited in line for four hours to purchase his set. We did offer him a 32 inch set we sold for $20 more than what he had paid but he wanted a larger size than that, so he had to settle for a refund. That does happen and unfortunately, this time of year there's nothing more that we can do.

Early Sunday morning, I had the pleasure of talking with a lady who knew more about where to find items in the store than I did. Just because I'm in there five days a week I obviously know nothing. She was looking for a home security system that we had advertised. When I told her that we didn't carry that in electronics, she argued with me. After spending about 3 minutes trying to convince her I finally told her that I would put her on hold and get someone from the hardware department to help, which is where this security systems are located. She had to have the last word and told me, " You can transfer me to hardware, but I know they are in electronics."

I have a lot of fun with the pallets of merchandise that are brought out that have items on it that don't belong in electronics. I make jokes about it and I'm not upset with the guys in the back, as I have unloaded trucks and when you're dealing with as many pieces of freight as they do every night there are bound to be mistakes. Whenever I see something I'll make a joke of how it could fit into electronics. Saturday night on my pallet I had two of these:

For those of you who have never seen one of those before it is a 10 inch buffer which is used to polish a car. So how to use it in electronics? Easy. This is the new way of cleaning your TV screen. It will definitely help us increase sales when people bust the screens up and have to buy new ones.