Fun facts in the US - Black Friday in the Mall of America (11/23/12)

This isn’t shopping. This is WAR!!! More than 500 stores, 4 levels and an own theme park with roller-coaster, carousels, so many other attractions and felt 1,000,000 other people with us in the same spot. 

But first things first. Black Friday is the day where all stores are getting out of the red numbers because after the Thanksgiving holyday nearly everybody has an additional day of and spend this day with shopping (except the poor guys who have to work during that day in the stores…) . So traditionally a lot of stores have special offers during this day to make this hype even worse.

In case of my experience there were people camping outside the stores for several hours or even days because “first 3 customers get 75% off”.  How crazy is that? In the news they told a story of a guy who waited about 38 hours in front of the store to save around $250 in the end. This was less than the minimum wage of $7.50 per hour…

We arrived at the Mall of America at 0:03am. Even if the stores just opened 3 minutes ago, we had to drive up to the 6^th level in the garage to find a parking lot (when we left again we realized that this wasn’t the worst place at all!). After reaching the entrance we speeded through the stores, moved our way through the growing crowd and tried to find some good deals. But for the real good ones we should have been there much earlier because several stores had waiting lines in front of them like BestBuy, Apple, and so forth. Kind of interesting was the appearance of the Microsoft store that looked exactly like an Apple store… so much for individuality. 

After making our way through the crowds for 2 hours we decided to go back to the hotel and come back on the next day after a good rest. We were quite surprised that there were less people during the afternoon at the mall than during the night. All lines were gone, even the biggest one in the Victoria’s Secret store where people hat to wait like felt 3-4 hours to get to the check-out. 

Even if we did not made some cool Black Friday deals it was quite an experience looking at all the Americans going crazy about some discounts. I wonder if we will have these events in Germany someday.