I plan to do as I do every Black Friday: enjoy my day off work by sleeping in as long as possible and hoping my phone doesn’t ring with a work issue. (I’m also on-call this week.) No deal is worth the aggravation of dealing with crazed shoppers all scrambling for some quantity-limited special item. I do most of my holiday shopping online in early November. I may not get quite as low a price as if I shopped after Thanksgiving, but it’s more than made up for in reduced stress. I have no worries about shipping times or items out of stock, I have no lines to wait in while freezing in the pre-dawn darkness, and no hair-trigger parents trampling their fellow shoppers in order to get that “must-have” toy for their child.

And I happen to know a black friday shopping guide site. The unique point is
You can do keywords, stores, price searching there, which is quite useful.
http://www.3deals.com/blackfridaysale/

I’m not crazy enough to go and sit out all night, but I normally do Black Friday every year. I go through the ads on Thanksgiving and sort out a plan for the specific things I want and then figure out what time each store opens. Usually that plan has me in the Circuit City line around 4:30-5 (they normally open at 6 and Best Buy is usually so much of a zoo that I skip it altogether), then head to OfficeMax or Office Depot and occasionally RadioShack depending on what the deals are. Yes, it’s a bit crazy to do that (especially in the cold of the Midwest), but my budget is tight enough that Black Friday deals are usually the only time I’ll actually go out and buy things like external hard drives, thumb drives, or other misc little gadgets.

However, I probably won’t be going this year. I’m on call for work and the deals that have been leaked so far don’t seem much better than a regular Sunday ad (apart from the rare $400 laptop or cheap TV).

@ Tate

Why wait until Black Friday for the Mini 9? Dell has better deals, for new machines, in their outlet, right now, and it’ll actually ship quick.

I do black Friday if there’s an unbelievable deal for something that I actually need, or want to buy for someone for Christmas.

This year, I haven’t seen any deals that will get me out of bed.

Tate, we’ve heard that Dell will offer a base Mini 9 for $299. Not a bad deal at all if you want to try out Linux on a solid netbook.

I normally don’t do black friday. But I have held off buying a netbook because I heard Dell is going to have a black friday special on the Mini 9. I want to try out a Linux netbook