O.K. so you have honed your body, and prepared your information for this great day of shopping. Now you need an A+ strategy for attacking the stores on Black Friday. The first step is decide, what is your have got to have number one item? Once you decide on your top pick you will need to know if there are other things on sale at that store that you want to pick up. However many individual items you want to purchase at the alpha store is how many people you need to take with you to that store. In my personal experience Wal-Mart is a lost cause. Why even put yourself in a place where you could get trampled? I would focus on the next tier Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, and other big box stores.

Now that you have determined your alpha target it is time to determine targets Bravo through golf (that’s 2-7 if you have that many). The way I do this is two fold. I list all the items I want to purchase in one column followed by the store that each item is on sale in the second column. I then rate how busy that store will be. If one item is more important than the others it moves to the top of the list and that store will be visited second. If they are all equal value I then determine the likely hood of that item selling out by how busy that store is likely to be. For example: If I were trying to get a great deal on a thumb drive and it was on sale at Circuit City (a high traffic store) I would go there much earlier in the day than if it were on sale at Staples, because people do not as easily think of Staples as a place to get a great deal on Black Friday. To Help you out here is my list rated from 5 to 1 (5-most traffic, 1-least traffic). This of course depends on if you have these store in your area.

5-Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Toys R Us
4-Circuit City, Comp USA, K Mart, HHGregg,
3-All the department stores (Sears, Macy’s, Etc.), Radio Shack
2-Home Depot, Lowes
1-Staples, Office Depot, Office Max, Ace Hardware, Pep Boys (yes even Pep Boys is in on the fun)

I have decided to add one more post onto this series so check back tomorrow for my the conclusion.

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