Well, no one else posted it yet... which is a little surprising. However here's what I remember doing.
Wake up, 5-6pm, shower, eat
7pm: dropped off roomies at the Target at 185th and Highway 26 (Edge of Hillsboro)
7:30pm: At work for evening passdown... I'm supposed to have the night off, but Extreme Badness occurred and they called me in anyway...
8pm: Back in line with roomies, no one is showing up yet... it's already starting to get cold, so I do a bathroom break and blanket run with them.
10pm: Things are starting to pickup a little... 1-2 other hard core groups show up hoping for big screen TVs at deals near last year's... (Honestly NO one needs a TV larger then 32 inches x.x)
12am: I get paged back in to work to go over the plans, submit my recommendations, go back to the line...
1am-2am: Back in line, killing time nothing really happening...
2am-4am: More people are showing up however it doesn't really start to fill in until 4am.
4am: The line starts to noticeably grow.
5:20am: Some guy from target hands out tickets for the TVs only, thinks there's a limit of 1 per person on the other major sale items (However 'normal retail quantity' is the only fine print for any other item...)
5:40am: Jerks begin to form a second line on the oppsite side of the entrance...
6am: they successfully snipe in to the first round of door-breaching, chaos begins.
At this point several major things go wrong:
- There's no noticeable crowd control happening, merely a funnel effect through one pair of the store's doors.
- We try to get carts, and head towards the section of the store that would normally hold the items... (LCD computer screens)
- They've erected a barricade in the area of the registers and say 'all the bulky stuff' is by the women's dressing room.
- Boxes of sewing machines, the crappy combo LCD display/TV/DVD player/etc is there too, nothing I'm looking for is (but every Minor deal that warranted large shipments was.)
- Down both major entryway isles are whole lines of carts dividing the isles.
- **Carts which impede the progress of those who HAVE carts...
- **...leading to many carts being abandoned down side isles, and the re-acquisition of other carts.
- Running around the store to the section (kitty corner) which I suspected had my monitors anyway, I reach the start of the gaming section, and see what I want on an endcut. 4 monitors, which I start loading in to my cart. 2 go in to one of the roomie's carts, he arrives from the correct side.
- That's all they have there, aside from a few of the other major tech deals, like the hard drive a friend next to us in line wanted (we grabbed it for him, and called him to let him know we had his screen and hard drive.)
- Major, MAJOR, MAJOR congestion in the electronics area... in the confusion we manage to grab a few of the cheep DVDs we wanted, and some we didn't even know they'd have that we wanted.
- One of the roomies saw the monitor area restocked, and sniped enough for us to get a total of 5 for our self's instead of just 3.
- We also saw one more on our way out... but decided against it at the time. I later bought something equivalent (almost exactly) from Staples Cyber Monday sale... which ended up being just $10 more...
Note of interest: First time out the doors, they didn't bother checking my receipt. However on the second run (we broke the monitors apart in to a 2 and 3 monitor exit), we all had our receipts checked... We can only assume they were reacting to some 'incident'.
We snagged Jack in the Box on the way home... mmm Spicy Chicken goodness.
