This year's Black Friday deals look pretty decent, with Best Buy offering a 42-inch LCD TV for $200 and Office Depot selling a 15.6-inch laptop for $400. But are these deals worth waiting in line at absurd hours in the November cold? Let's do some calculations.
I've lined up a few times for Black Friday in the past, waking up while it's still dark and putting on warm clothes?never warm enough, for some reason?to stand outside a store with a couple hundred other people in search for a deal. Problem is, I always make the mistake of thinking arriving for an 8:00 AM store opening at 5:00 or 6:00 AM will be good enough to get me a decent place in line; not first, but maybe 60th or so. I'm always wrong, and no matter how early I get there, it's always already packed with people who have been there since the night before.
Lesson 1: You can never arrive early enough to a big Black Friday sale.
But alright, let's suppose you're committed to this than me. What's the next step?
Where should you line up?
All the best deals (the door-busters) at every store will be sold out within the first twenty people, meaning that if you're lining up, it should be at the store with the thing you want the most. First, figure out what you you actually need, and by need, I mean things that you are going to buy even without a sale.
Let's say you wanted a new TV, a new printer, and a new router. Now look at the deals and figure out how much money you'd save on each item. This year, you're getting a TV from Best Buy at $300 off, a printer at OfficeMax for $170 off, and a new router also at OfficeMax for $30 off. It should be obvious that you should go to Best Buy, because even though Office Max has two of the items you want, you're saving more money in total by buying the TV. So even if you had to pay full price for the printer and router later on?you won't, because there are more sales elsewhere and Cyber Monday is coming up?you've still optimized your savings.
Of course, this is all moot if you're not going to actually line up early enough to get get the deal. See lesson one.
When is the optimum time to line up?
The question of "when you should line up" depends heavily on what store, how good their deals are this year and what kind of people live in the area. It's a little delicate to say, but if your target store is in a neighborhood with a lot of gated communities and high-priced homes, chances are those residents won't be lining up at 4AM to save a couple hundred bucks on a TV or a computer. The rest of us can take advantage.
But no matter what, your driving principle should be to minimize the time spent at the store?which includes all the time spent in the car, waiting in line, shopping, checking out, and on the way home. It's all the time between you pulling out of your garage and going back in. If you leave home at 3:00 AM, get to the store at 3:30, get inside at 9:00, check out at 9:30 and get back home at 11:00, that's a total of 8 hours, or one full work-day.
Adjusting your entry time will naturally affect your exit time. In our hypothetical example, if you line up the previous night at 10:00 PM, which should probably guarantee you a top-10 or 20 slot, your entry time will be 8:00, exit time will be 8:30, and you get home at 9:00. That's 12 hours. Similarly, if you leave your house at 7:00 AM, the line might be so long and checkout so slow that you're not getting back home until 2:00 PM, for a total of 7 hours.
Obviously you want to be as early in the line as possible, not just because it's faster, but because you want the best deals. So as much as it may hurt your body and your soul, to ensure you get that TV for $300 off, you're going to have to spend the whole night standing outside Best Buy.
How much is your time worth?
In our previous Best Buy TV example, you saved $300 on a TV but spent 12 hours doing so, which is the equivalent of working a job for 12 hours and getting paid $25 per hour. That's actually a post-tax number, so you'd need to make $36 per hour in order to make it out the door with $25 (at a 30% tax rate). Now, $36 an hour is a pretty decent pay rate (it comes out to about $72,000 a year), so if you make less than this at your current job, it's sort of like you're working a second job at a higher rate. Plus, you're not doing a whole lot at this gig other than standing outside in the cold?a pretty easy job description for any job, especially one in which you can and are encouraged to fall asleep.
Also, a lot of us work jobs where we get a set pay rate per month, so we can't just go up to our bosses and say, "Hey Bob, I'm gonna put in 12 extra hours today, so I'm gonna expect appropriate compensation at the end of the month." Hence, the $300 savings is an opportunity you wouldn't normally get at your normal job.
On the other hand, how much is your free time worth? Are you willing to postpone a night's sleep for $300? Some people (understandably) aren't. If you're just going to conk out when you get home after Black Friday, you're basically losing a good chunk of that day. Are your relatives in town? Would you rather be spending time with them? Or if it's not spending time with your relatives, would you rather be spending time with people you love? These are all things you should consider when you calculate how much your time is worth on Black Friday.
Furthermore, if at any point during the night you feel like saying, "I would pay them $300 if I could go home and go back to sleep," then you shouldn't line up. It's a similar idea to paying $75 every two weeks for someone to clean your house. If you hate cleaning and would rather be doing anything else, it's money well spent. If you hate lining up and doing nothing for eight hours, it might be worthwhile to pay to NOT do that, which is essentially what you're doing by not waiting getting in on this deal.
But if you have a good group of people with you and turn it into a fun night out, that's worth something as well.
How about Cyber Monday?
On the flip side of this weekend, Cyber Monday is a made-up holiday I can get behind. When you look at Black Friday, you're outside, in the cold (or rain), with a bunch of strangers standing in line being bored. On Cyber Monday, you're at work, sitting in your comfy office chair, in a temperature-controlled environment in front of a computer. And, because Cyber Monday has become more and more popular and the deals are getting better and better?to even Black Friday-ish levels?you don't necessarily have to wait in line to get the stuff you want.
So to recap, on Cyber Monday, you're:
- Not super cold
- Paid to be there
- Saving just about as much money as Black Friday
- Not bored because you have a computer in front of you that has access to THE INTERNET
- Getting out of doing actual work because you're shopping
Unless you have a specific deal during Black Friday that you're unlikely to get on Cyber Monday, it seems pretty clear what you should do.
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