Black Friday

Fist Fights. Diving over tables. Screaming. In general, complete mayhem. Or at least that is what I was expecting from the build up about Black Friday. Unfortunately, not even one argument all day. I heard that people started the line by 2 pm on Thanksgiving (15 hours before we opened), but the line was not really that long when I arrived at 4:15 am to start working. When it came time to open, at 5 am, I was ready for a blitz of people scrambling to scoop up every last item in the store. I also expected it to last all morning. The first 15 minutes looked promising, I had people on all sides asking me to point them in the right direction for the deal that they wanted. but then the people all started to leave and move on to other stores. By 8 am, we were already sending people home who had split shifts. They had all been scheduled to help out until 10 am.

My favorite question of the day, and most popular question to ask was, "Do you still have this computer?" Pointing to the computer on the front page of the Black Friday ad, the one that people lined up outside the day before to make sure they got. We had ticketed that item and handed tickets out starting at 2:30 am. The tickets were good until 9 am at which point they were released for anyone to get. When people found this out a line started to form in order to get first shot once they were released. This line started forming at around 7:30 am. Despite the fact that they were all gone by around 10 am, people were still hoping to get the computer when I left the store at 5 pm.

In order to ensure that the Best Buy employees were able to keep a smile on their face throughout the long shifts, they offered two perks. One was free Chipotle. It was delivered every two hours and available for lunch. The other was a masseuse. She arrived at 10 and was just there in the employee break room giving out massages all day.

All in all, people were in a good mood. I met one lady who told me she was leaving for Venezuela on Wednesday and was buying a computer for her 52nd anniversary gift. I only encountered two people who were less than happy. One was upset because we advertised a computer on a two day sale but sold them all. He felt that if the computer was on a two day sale, then we should still have them in stock for both days. He did not seem to understand that we had the minimum number of the computer and we had sold them all. The other dissatisfied customer was upset that we advertised 2 GB of ram on sale, but it was a package of 2 1 GB sticks of ram instead of one stick of 2 GB ram. But other than those two incidences, it was a pretty pleasant day.

After 12 and a half hours in Best Buy you would probably not expect me to return to another Best Buy again in the same day. But alas, we went to Chesterfield Commons for dinner and some shopping at Best Buy. I bought the Olympus 1030 sw camera that I plan on using while SCUBA diving. It is waterproof to 33 feet, shock proof to a 6.6 feet fall, crush proof for 270 pounds, and freeze proof. It also has a manometer to measure the altitude or depth of your picture.

Then I went to bed at about 10 pm while watching Blue Planet: Seas of Life, the tidal seas episode.

A week of night

This past week was the first week in quite a while were I actually had hours at work. The catch, I started at 10 pm (7 pm on Sunday) and finished around 9am every day. I volunteered to work the night shift in order to redo the entire computer department. The original layout made the department feel small and there was no visibility to know what was happening throughout the department. There were high bays that were about ten feet tall holding all the product. The good thing about these was their ability to hold lots of product and overstock on top them. They also were the reason that the department felt so small.

For the whole week, we would take down a high bay and all the product on it and build smaller gondolas. We then would try to make everything fit. Not only were we changing what was holding the product, but just about every item in the department had a new home. So we moved everything sometimes everything multiple times. The printers got moved a total of 5 times. Any time something heavy needed to be moved, they would find either my self or the other volunteer from the computer department. It did not take long for the both of us to become rather sore from the lifting.

One night we got to move the speaker displays. They are all on shelves with a sub shelf designed to hold all of the wiring and a circuit board to allow them to be tested. The best hand hold on the shelves were holes in the side that you could fit three fingers in. It was not a comfortable grip and the shelves weighed quite a bit. The Bose display was set up on a 4 foot by 1.5 foot particle board base with another particle board 4 foot by 1 foot back. This one was by far the heaviest and when we were setting it up, we got one side of the shelf in place and I was not able to get my side in place. The person helping me came to help and we moved it just a little and the whole shelf came out and the Bose display fell leaving a rather large dent in the base of the gondola. But nothing on the display broke because it was all bolted to particle board.

It was surprisingly easy to adjust to a night schedule. I found that when I got home I was not even all that tired, until I stopped moving, then I fell asleep fairly easily and then wake up in time for dinner, or breakfast as the case may be.