You may not know this, but I grew up in the Midwest. I was born in Wisconsin, moved to Minnesota when I was six, moved to Iowa after high school and then three years ago my husband and I moved thousands of miles away from our family to a place called Yakima. Where I grew up Black Friday was serious business and you had to be a careful planner willing to do unthinkable things to get electronics for a steal.

Some of my favorite memories are of my mom, sister and I standing outside Best Buy in the middle of the night, bundled up (we were in Minnesota, after all) waiting in line. They used to hand out Geek Squad t-shirts, Krispy Kreme donuts and Caribou coffee to the faithful. Since this took place before cell phones we each had a walkie talkie and a game plan. When those doors opened we divided and conquered. Our family got our first DVD player on a Black Friday sale! My dad used to ask my mom how she could stand in the freezing cold in the middle of the night just to get a deal and she turned right around to ask him how he could sit in a deer stand in the middle of the night in the freezing cold just to get a shot at a deer!

As an adult I have continued the tradition, going out in the wee hours of the morning to stand in line in the freezing cold to score a deal. My husband even got into it one year when our son was only a week old and there was a video camera he really wanted. He had no choice but to go because I definitely wasn't! When we moved to Yakima I faithfully got in line outside Target our first year here to score the deals I wanted. In the three years I have gone out on Black Friday in Yakima I have gotten everything I wanted and then some. I don't think Black Friday here quite meets the insanity I grew up with (unless you're going to Toys R Us...that place is ca-razy the day after Thanksgiving). In fact last year I woke up in the middle of the night to buy a blu-ray player from Walmart.com. Our second son was only a couple of months old and I didn't want to get up in the early morning and stand in line at the actual store because I was so tired. I got the blu-ray player ordered and in the morning our family headed to see what was left at the West Valley Walmart. We were shocked to see an entire stack of the exact blu-ray player I had ordered sitting in one of the aisles. I could have avoided ordering online altogether and just picked one up!

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