Black Friday used to be an awesome day, one of my favorite days of the year.

It is always within 4 days of my birthday, so the bargains of the day coincided nicely for me right off the bat.

I remember the good old days (before all the ads were available online weeks beforehand) when I would run out of my dorm first thing Thursday morning and buy the local paper. Back then stores like Best Buy actually had amazing deals.

One year I was able to get 4 $400 cell phones out the door for free after $250 off instantly and a $150 Best Buy rebate without even activating a plan!

Another time I got tons of fairly expensive electronics at CompUSA all for free after rebates.

I went religiously every year and often camped out at stores like Best Buy until 2005. (Besides for when my birthday came out on Black Friday on November 26, 2004, when I was down in S. Paulo, Brazil. I was so down about missing the deals that in a stroke of fate I decided to start a blog called ctownbochur.blogspot.com and shared it with a couple friends on AIM…maybe you’ve heard of it?)

I was always able to make enough money reselling the goodies on Ebay to feed my technology bug for the entire next year.

Last year’s Black Friday sales were lame.

This year’s offerings are worse.

I mean for 364 days out the year, no savvy shopper would ever walk into a Best Buy or CompUSA, but at least they had 1 day of good deals.

Do they think that the Black Friday hype is so great that they can still draw the same crowd while not offering any compelling offers?

Or have they simply gotten smarter and realized that selling items at a loss doesn’t make good business sense. After all the term “Black Friday” is thought to have come from the fact that this was the day when retailers would finally climb out of “the red” and into “the black” for the year, due to it being the busiest shopping day of the year.

It actually made perfect business sense. There were only a very limited number of deeply discounted items, but every store still drew thousands of customers buying other items to make up for it. Besides the best deals were always after rebates, which most people seemingly don’t even bother to apply for.

Black Friday used to be a bunch of marketing hype, but savvy shoppers could still come out ahead.

Now it is all hype, without any of the benefits.

Goodbye Black Friday. It was nice while you lasted.

Maybe you didn’t notice: I’ve been on the road since early Sunday morning.

In the past I’ve always had an excuse for enjoying some precious days off from updating this website while traveling, but now I have a Palm Centro.

The Centro is the best device from Palm yet.

At first I had my reservations, the thumbpad seems to small to be usable, and the casing a little too “plasticky.” However after some use it was clear that the Centro is a winner.

It is significantly smaller and lighter than previous Treos, it actually feels like a regular phone when you’re holding it.

As far as the thumbpad-I was pleasantly surprised with how good the accuracy was.

It has a speedy processor and suffers none of the lags than plagued some previous Treo’s.

Even better: The internet speeds and push email functionality are top-notch.

The Centro has the fastest web-browsing that I have seen on a phone, and it performs flawlessly and swiftly when tethered to a laptop. (I’m talking about speeds better than the wretched AT&T DSL that I recently canceled when I finally made the switch to cable!)

Best of all: Sprint doesn’t charge me a penny to use their high-speed EV-DO data network and the push-email program and service is on the house!

Blackberry-What for?!?



As for where I was…

Sunday: In Crown Heights at the L’chaim (engagement party) of Yarden Blumstein, my chassidus chavrusa (learning partner) of 5 consecutive years!

Monday: In Monsey at the wedding of a first cousin of mine, Avigail Eleff to Ariel Fogel—Mazal Tov!
(Special kudos to Eli for the place card…lol)

Monday night was spent at the Sheraton in nearby Mahwah, NJ. This was really a beautiful hotel. It cost a whole $60 thanks to priceline, and they gave me a sweet Starwood Gold upgraded suite on the club level just for the asking!

Finally, thanks to Sruly Kotlarsky for the tip to dine at the Purple Pear in Monsey yesterday-I can heartily recommend it!

Post from November 16th, 2006’s Merger Rumor de jour Linky
I predicted then that USAirways’ $8,000,000,000 buyout would fall through.  I don’t recall, but seemingly I also had a lot of fun going through the hypotheticals of the merger…

The differences today?

-Gerald Grinstein, a major proponent of a standalone Delta, is no longer CEO.
-The buyout partner isn’t some two-bit airline, but one of the largest in the world.
-$100 oil is a reality, and not a distant nightmare.

I don’t know if Delta will merge with United, (even if they wanted to, the anti-trust pressures of creating the world’s largest airline would be massive) but it seems that here is a lot of internal and external pressure for market consolidation…and market consolidation is rarely ever good news for the consumer.