It’s Black Friday today. While I generally don’t like the way that we’ve moved with pushing the “shopping season” to be longer and longer, our family has decided that it’s alright to move the timing of our celebration a little to accommodate a business opportunity. Cheap LEGO parts are worth some small sacrifices.
Which store to go to? In our area, Wal-Mart and Target are the main big box stores that sell LEGO sets. And in this respect, Wal-Mart is the clear winner. While Target will offer some modest deals on a couple of branded sets, Wal-Mart carries special sets that aren’t available elsewhere. The last two years they carried a 1,500 piece set of basic building blocks for only $30. To give an idea of the value here, some folks buy a lot of these and re-sell them at $75-100 throughout the rest of the year. This year, they offered a box with 900 basic bricks for $20. Basic bricks appeal to a very wide audience, so they are great for our inventory. That made Wal-Mart the hands down winner for where I’d do our Black Friday shopping.
In store, or at home?
Last year, we got most of the Black Friday specials online. At midnight Eastern, we were able to buy the set on special in quantities up to 12 per order with free shipping. That made it far better than waiting in the store and trying to navigate through crowds. This year was different. Online, Wal-Mart limited quantities to 1 per order, which kept it short of their threshold for free shipping as well. Not a good deal unless you were also buying something else. And even this disappeared by early Friday morning, so I decided to head to the store. As soon as we finished the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Special and our pizza, I drove the van to Wal-Mart.
At our local Wal-Mart there were tons of shoppers. But few of them were wrangling for LEGO parts, most of them seemed more interested in ginormous TVs. I was actually able to make several runs into the store, filling a shopping cart each time, over the course of two hours. Here are some pictures of the haul.
Do you think I got enough?
