I will be offering a 15% discount on all items in my etsy shop November 27-30. Sale starts at 12:00am Friday Morning, and ends at 11:59pm Monday evening, Central Standard Time. Free shipping and gift wrap still included!

Sale at Kaelin Design!

Now admittedly, I love a bargain as much as the next person. In fact, there have been times that I have been known to tell everyone that I know about it when I feel that I got an exceptional price on something. However, I have never in my life seen a sale that is worth the cost that one man paid today in New York.

Most of you I am sure heard about this – a Walmart employee when attempting to unlock the doors for the day after Thanksgiving early bird sale was trampled by the crowd of bargain hunting consumers that had been lined up outside. Breaking down the doors, they surged into the store – each one of them trampling again, or at the very least, sweeping past with no regard to the man lying helplessly on the floor. Other store employees tried to reach him to help but they too were knocked down before being able to get to him. In addition to employees, several consumers also fell – one of them was a woman who was eight months pregnant. Police and medics were called to the store and several people were taken to local hospitals including the first employee who had been trampled. Police attempted to get some control and, after learning that the employee unlocking the doors had died at the hospital, announced that the store was closing due to the death. The consumers reacted by angrily refusing to leave the sale that they had waited in line for and continued shopping.

Media reaction to this story has been fairly consistent. Each states that this is a tragedy, that it should not happened,…and that Walmart should have prevented this. I don’t know what stuns me more – the incident itself or the media’s comments. I agree that Walmart should have had extra security and a manager on hand to help assess the situation thougout the night. However, I do not believe that with the possible exception of a small percentage, Walmart is the one who should face a judge and be held liable.

One of the cornerstones of which my built upon and that my values are based on, is to take responsibility for my own actions. Another is, when able, to help someone else in need. This morning, a crowd of adults killed someone with absolutely no regard or remorse. I strongly urge the officers that are reviewing this case to bring in every person possible who walked over, on, or past the fallen employee and force them to defend themselves in front of a jury of their peers. These people should have been adult enough to have the ability to control themselves, to help their fellow man, to respect anothers life and property, and to act in an appropriate manner. I would love to hear them attempt to explain why they felt it okay to trample someone just to get to a sale.

I hope that those who were involved in that consumer rush this morning is having a real hard time sleeping about now.  And I hope that the police and the justice system take a stand and bring down every single identifiable person involved.  And maybe we will all learn that instead of trying to make a quick buck for ourselves by placing blame upon and suing corporations, that we should instead be enough of a person to realize that we are responsible for our own actions – however stupid or thoughtless they may be.

No sale is worth someone’s life.

Heading out to shop on the day after Thanksgiving is a major family tradition of mine. This year, we are hitting the road to visit my Grandpa in Southern Indiana, so we will not be shopping. That is ok, though. I have plenty of Day-After-Thanksgiving memories to last me a lifetime. Queensboro has been known to have a great sale or two on this so-called “Black Friday,” so it is worth checking out the website if you stumble upon this post before next week.

What is “Black Friday?”

The origin of the term is thought to date back to the 1960s. The term was not originally used lovingly by retailers, but rather to describe the chaotic nature of the day brought on by the increased traffic. In the early 1980s, retailers and the media began using this term more frequently because it referenced the timeframe when a retailer finally began to turn a profit. Their accounting sheets would be “in the black” (black ink denoting profits) instead of “in the red,” (red ink denoting losses). Today, if you talk to shopkeepers that have to come in on Thanksgiving to decorate for the holidays, and then come back in at 4:00 a.m. on the day after to open up, “Black Friday” could refer to the circles under their eyes.

Cyber Monday

“Cyber Monday” is what we, at Queensboro, look forward to in terms of post-Thanksgiving shopping. That’s because we are an internet company, and “Cyber Monday” is the day when everybody goes back to work and spends the entire morning not working, but shopping for great online deals. Of course, at Queensboro, every day is Cyber Monday, because we always have great deals with no strings attached!

My Day-After-Thanksgiving Memories

Oh my, there are so many. Such as the Day-After-Thanksgiving when we had to go get another car to shop with because I had wrecked our car. Or, another year when I worked at the retailer Brookstone at the mall (I was the one with black circles under my eyes that day). I will never forget one particular Day- After-Thanksgiving spent at the old Ayres department store in downtown Indianapolis. Ayres was the last, true department store that was left in my hometown, complete with brass elevators and a tea room. We always got to decorate cookies to take home. I miss that place. There was also a beautiful Day-After-Thanksgiving spent in Vermont with my whole family, and my (now) husband, where we strolled the meandering streets of Middlebury and reveled in small-town cheer.

Wherever you are, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and are enjoying your “Black Friday”activities- whether they include shopping or recovering. We look forward to seeing you on “Cyber Monday!”

last night was yet another night spent out in front of circuit city…it was quite interesting. we got there at 7:30 and hung out all night with people looking to get laptops, tv’s and desktop computers. the line wrapped around the entire building and there were only 30 laptops to go around. we scored 2!

bonus – I picked up a mio navigation system for $99!  i had one and it was liberated (stolen) from my car in my driveway several months ago. I also picked up a pile of dvd’s the office season 2 was like $12 and rocky fights arthritis was like $6…I went over to toys r us and picked up a yoshi lunch-box (nintendo ds starter kit) for al and the checkout line was foolish!  it took like 27 minutes to get out -by far the quickest lines-they wrapped around the entire store, but you never really stopped moving! props go out to toys r us!
some read this and say thats whack – well i’m the one holding the bag!  sorry its totally addicting to embark on this adventure! 
the annual adventure to run in and grab some electronics is over… 

We added two new tools to ease shoppers search for bargains! We added dealboard (http://dealboard.viddu.com) which provides a central place for looking at all the hot deals on the web and we added blackfriday (http://blackfriday.viddu.com) which shows all the blackfriay ads from all the shop right there in one single page.

Never before you could see all the deals from everyone in one single page. In addition to this try using Cooliris plugin for Firefox and IE6 to see how you can preview all the deals without leaving viddu.com