Sometimes people do things that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense. Sometimes we put ourselves in the way of large crowds that will likely crush us or screaming teenagers that will make our ears bleed (New Moon is coming out tomorrow and for some reason or another I really want to go see it TOMORROW instead of waiting). Why do we do it?

Of course, this time of year has people thinking about Black Friday specials and sales. Because I am in the market for a laptop this year, I will likely be found camped outside one of the Best Buys within 2 hours of my house for the Sony Vaio that is going to be on sale that day. I have never camped outside a store for hours and hours for one of the big ticket items like this.

However, the crowds will form every single year regardless of what is on sale or what kind of tragedies happen the year before (last year the crowd of people at a Wal-Mart in New York trampled one of the employees to death and injured others). I have been in line before two years ago waiting for a Nintendo Wii and had a man walk into the store just because there was a crowd. He didn’t know what was on sale or why the people were there, but he stood in line as well.

There are going to be some measures that stores like Wal-Mart will be taking this year to try to hopefully make sure that people aren’t killing each other this year, but I’m just not looking forward to the fight for the laptops.

Then again, I know exactly why people will be camped outside some Best Buy stores DAYS before Black Friday…To save money. There are plenty of people out there with loads of time and little money who still want to buy Christmas gifts. The laptop I am after is selling for $399 or $479 with a blu-ray player. Anywhere around the internet, just with a brief search the NW series from Sony often costs around $700. I think I can stand in line for a few hours to save that much money, but I think the one thing that I’m worried about is that I’ll miss out on it.

I have, in the past, always gone to Wal-Mart on Black Friday to “people watch”. There is something strangely entertaining about watching people rip open plastic and push and shove people out of the way to get some towels, sheets, or a Barbie doll. Last year, I saw madness for EVERYTHING that the store had on sale. I didn’t ever think I would see people hurt each other over fake Christmas Trees, but it happened.

Overall, I believe that Black Friday is more about the frenzy than sales. If you follow some of the “deal” websites on the internet, then you can see that there are places throughout the year when you can find GREAT deals on things that are offered on Black Friday.

green (as in “going green”)
carbon footprint or carbon offsetting
maverick (I suppose this means Sarah Palin impersonations will have to cease?)
first dude
bailout (I’m sure you’ll all still hear this one plenty of times on this blog)
Wall Street/Main Street
monkey (really??)
<3
icon or iconic
game changer
staycation
desperate search
not so much
winner of five nominations
it’s that time of year again

There were around 5,000 nominations this year, too bad “Joe the Plumber” didn’t make the list.

Source

Analysts are predicting 3 million more job losses between now and spring 2010.

Not that any time of the year is a good time to lose your job, but especially around this time of year. Many families will have to scale down the holidays this year, or skip the gift giving altogether.

You have to really dig around to find the good news in all the economic bad news. Even experts are saying the economy is in a free-fall.

Half-million jobs vanish as economy deteriorates

To protect yourself through the holiday season (and throughout the year) here are some tips from the AP about how to keep your identity and credit cards safe while shopping online and offline.

First, if I can, I buy my books online. Campusbooks.com lets you compare prices on used books from several different online places. This also comes in handy for the second tip…

I also try to buy previous editions of textbooks. For example, in my consumer behavior class, the syllabus clearly stated that the previous edition of the textbook was accepted. However, plenty of my classmates decided to buy the $108 current edition. The previous edition cost me $5 AND it’s where the professor got most of her charts and graphs for PowerPoint presentations.

In a lot of my classes, the professors usually never use an entire book. I utilized iChapters.com and saved around $50 on my business stats book because we only needed a few chapters. At iChapters you can buy chapters instead of whole books.

Sometimes I don’t buy the book at all. In lecture classes, my professors usually never used the book for tests, but would test directly from lecture notes. This depends on the professor though, and usually doesn’t work for higher level classes. Ask my journalism ethics grade…I needed the book but was just too cheap to buy it.

Another way to save money on textbooks is to rent them. Websites like campusbookrentals.com let students rent books for periods of 55, 85, or 130 days and offer them at pretty good prices. For example, Principles of Macroeconomics by Case and Fair retails for around $130 (which is outrageous considering it’s a paperback…well it’s outrageous anyway) you can rent it at campus book rentals.com for around $34. However, I’ve never rented books… with this macroeconomics book, if you look at campusbooks.com you’ll see that the cheapest price online is $34.95 to BUY the book. I’d rather buy it then rent it because at the end of the semester, you can always sell it online too…