Black Friday is something that I call a combat sport. I say that because you have to fight through crowds to get the best deals. But my wife convinced me that we should give it a try this year. So, to slant things to the advantage of myself and my wife I decided to try and leverage technology whenever possible as I hate crowds and shopping.
The use of technology started in our driveway. We leveraged our Garmin 1350 LMT navigation system to plot us the best route to get us to Fashion Outlet Mall in Niagara Falls NY. Even though we were leaving at 5AM, we figured that it would help us to pick the fastest way across the US/Canada border. This proved to be the correct call as we were able to get a route that took us over the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge which was a 15 minute wait at that border crossing. The other option was the Rainbow Bridge and that was a 30 to 60 minute wait according to the signs that we saw on the highway and on the Canada Border Services website that my wife was able to check from her iPhone as I was doing the driving. Of course, we needed our passports and one thing we did to protect ourselves is we took photos of the photo pages of our passports. That way if we lost one or both passports, we could work with Canadian Border Services to get home by showing them that we were actually Canadian citizens.
When we arrived at the mall, we got lucky when it came to parking as there happened to be a space that opened up as we drove in. But the mall is huge, so we needed to make sure that we could find the car when we were done shopping. Good thing there’s an app for that and that app is called CarFinder for iOS. It uses Augmented Reality to help trace your steps back to where you parked. Anyone can use it and it works very, very well. Now, once inside the mall, we executed our plan of what stores we going to and what we were buying. We had set a limit of $200 each Canadian as that is the maximum that we could spend without getting dinged for taxes on our way back into Canada if we were outside Canada for 24 hours. Now we were not going to be gone that long so that didn’t matter, but we thought it was a good idea to have a spending limit anyway. Now we were going to shop separately to make sure we could be as efficient as possible. Plus we wouldn’t drive each other nuts by how fast or slow we took in a particular store. One thing that helped us was that we had e-mailed the map of the mall as well the list of the specials that each store had in PDF format so that we can refer to them as needed from our iPhones. That proved to be very handy. Another thing that was handy was being able to keep each other up to date as to where we were and what we were doing. We usually do that by using iMessage since we both have iPhones. Now since we were in another country, roaming charges do apply. But to keep those under control, Rogers hooked my wife up with US Roaming for the day which took care of her data, text and voice charges for the day. In my case, I put the AT&T SIM card that I always have when I travel to the US into my unlocked iPhone 5.
Now over the next three hours, we did our best to help the American economy and I believe we found the best deals. It helped that we had access to data on our phones to see what stuff normally costs to see if there were real savings or not. For example, I went into a well known clothing store as they advertised 30% off everything in the store based on the lowest ticketed price. It sounded decent. But by using ScanLife and scanning the UPC codes on the items I was interested in, I was able to determine that the lowest ticketed price was not their regular price. It was roughly 20% higher. Thus I was really only saving 10%. That wasn’t a deal. However, I went to another store and found that their “door crasher” special of shirts for $29.99 down from $90 if you shopped before 9AM was actually a real deal using the same method. Hint to retail stores. In this age of smartphones and apps, trying to fake that you have a special when you really just raised your prices artificially only to lower them back to where they usually are isn’t going to work anymore.
By the end of it, we managed to do pretty well I think. Total damage $417 plus the taxes we had to pay at the border. On our way home, the Garmin 1350 LMT came in handy as it not only got us over the Rainbow Bridge which was the faster of the two bridges coming back into Canada, but it also re-routed us around an accident on our way home. Nice. Thus, we were home by noon.
Technology absolutely made this Black Friday civilized. I may do this again next year and do so without my wife prompting me.
Black Friday Deal Roundup
Posted in Commentary with tags Black Friday on November 25, 2016 by itnerdI know that this is a bit last minute, but here’s some suggestions if you’re interested in picking up some tech related Black Friday deals:
KIDZ GEAR: Headphones for Kids From Fri, November 25- Monday, November 28th you can get the following at the Kidz Gear Headphones website:
Paragon’s macOS/PC Software: All Paragon Software Group’s macOS and PC hard disk management software now through Monday, November 28th, at up to 50% off. No coupon needed. Click this link for more details.
GAMESIR G3s Gamepad – Portable Game Controller: On Black Friday: Friday, November 25th, the GameSir G3S Gamepad multi-platform portable game controller for Android, Windows, iOS, & PS3 will be priced at $29.99 down from $79.99.
Buy at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019H5II8Y
NEWERTECH Mac/Smartphone/Tablet Accessories: STARTING WED, NOVEMBER 23 at 7 PM EST, Free Shipping in the USA for $49 & up and discounted international shipping from about $5.00! Hundreds of great specials are available. Check out this link for details.
If I get any more deals, I’ll update this post.
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