{"id":3744,"date":"2018-11-23T10:36:44","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T15:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=3744"},"modified":"2018-11-23T11:34:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-23T16:34:49","slug":"black-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2018\/11\/black-friday\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once again Black Friday is now on Thursday, right after Thanksgiving dinner. So I got to eat a delicious dinner and then drive to Best Buy. This wasn&#8217;t a spur of the moment decision, but the result of a year&#8217;s worth of patience and research. I had been buying a lot of Blu-rays this year, so there wasn&#8217;t much more that I really wanted, plus I don&#8217;t feel like this has been a particularly strong year for movie releases, so I really only wanted about five titles.<\/p>\n<p>Similar to last year, Best Buy&#8217;s ad generally had the best deals and their Black Friday ad came out in early November. Walmart had a decent ad, but it didn&#8217;t say what all they had for sale, instead saying &#8220;50 titles at this price,&#8221; but only showing 8 titles, leaving you no clue on the other 42. Target had a few okay deals. Frys didn&#8217;t really even try this year, with only a small selection of 4K movies for $1 more than Best Buy&#8217;s price. I came up with this list of Best Buy picks (the last numbers are the Rotten Tomato and Metacritic scores):<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>Avengers Infinity War<\/em>, $6.99, 84\/68\n<li><em>Black Panther<\/em>, $6.99, 97\/88\n<li><em>Blade Runner 2049<\/em>, $5.99, 87\/81\n<li><em>Manchester by the Sea<\/em>, $3.99, 95\/96\n<li><em>Paddington 2<\/em>, $5.99, 100\/88\n<\/ol>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Honestly I wasn&#8217;t that crazy about <em>Infinity War<\/em>, but the $6.99 price is as good or better than I can do at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2016\/09\/disney-movie-club\/\">Disney Movie Club<\/a> and since I will see the second part of the movie when it comes out in May, it would be good to be able to watch it over again before that. Of those five, the most critically acclaimed at Rotten Tomatoes is <em>Paddington 2<\/em>, with a 100% rating, the only movie I haven&#8217;t seen yet. There were other movies I was considering like the animated feature <em>Book of Life<\/em> (82\/67) at only $3.99, a movie about Mexico&#8217;s Day of the Dead tradition which came out before Pixar&#8217;s better rated movie about that called <em>Coco<\/em> (97\/81). I was also considering 2016 Best Picture winner <em>La La Land<\/em>, I mean <em>Moonlight<\/em> (98\/99!). I never saw <em>Moonlight<\/em> and am pretty sure I wouldn&#8217;t like it, but it was only $3.99 and has amazing review scores. I had seen and liked the movies <em>Phantom Thread<\/em> (91\/90) and <em>Lady Bird<\/em> (99\/94), but they were $7.99 each on Blu-ray so they were maybes. Also it would be good to get some 4K titles and Best Buy had some for only $7.99. At that price point <em>Deepwater Horizon<\/em> (84\/68) and <em>Patriots Day<\/em> (80\/69) looked like the best choices. The French-made sci-fi movie <em>Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets<\/em>, which was a critical and commercial bomb (48\/51), but also visually spectacular, was another possibility just to show off what the TV could do. I would rather get <em>Black Panther<\/em> or <em>Blade Runner 2049<\/em> in 4K, but those were $15.99 and I don&#8217;t think my TV is good enough to show much difference, so not worth paying twice as much.<\/p>\n<p>Before Black Friday ever happens, Best Buy offers their rewards members early access. Since getting a Best Buy Visa card last year, I have used it enough to earn Elite Plus status which allowed me to get their Black Friday deals online on Sunday at 1 AM before Thanksgiving. I figured I could get most everything early and have it shipped to me instead of &#8220;fighting the crowds&#8221; at Best Buy Thursday night (unless you are there right at the opening these crowds do not usually exist), but instead you end up staying up late on Saturday night because they do run out of titles in the first hour. If I got all five of my movie picks that would cost about $30 so I went ahead and exchanged most of my rewards points in for a $20 gift certificate. Unfortunately, the advance sale was really lame, so hardly any of the movies I wanted were at the Black Friday price, just <em>Blade Runner 2049<\/em> and <em>Black Panther<\/em> and those together would not be over $20, so I couldn&#8217;t use my certificate (should have gotten smaller certificates). However, because it was early Sunday morning, that week&#8217;s Best Buy ad came out and they had a couple of good titles now available at $3.99 that were not part of the Black Friday ad, so I included <em>Madagascar<\/em> and <em>How to Train Your Dragon<\/em> for $3.99 each (<em>Madagascar 3<\/em> was available at the same price, but I hadn&#8217;t liked it as much while the second one was my favorite and not on sale). Well, somehow it escaped me that those 4 movies together would be over $20 and I could use the certificate, so I wound up just getting <em>Blade Runner<\/em> and the two cartoons and not using the certificate. One concern I had was whether I would get slipcovers on the movies or not and I knew that none of the store copies of <em>Blade Runner<\/em> had slipcovers, but some of the <em>Black Panther<\/em> copies did, so it was better to wait on <em>Black Panther<\/em> (usually slipcovers are only available on the first printing and later are left off, but it varies, with Disney tending to keep them longer than other studios).<\/p>\n<p>Best Buy (and everyone else) puts out cardboard stands in the aisles to hold all of the Black Friday movies. These are called shippers. On Wednesday, someone posted pictures of the opened shippers at their Best Buy. The good thing was there were lots of copies of the Marvel movies and they had slipcovers. In fact, so did all of my choices except <em>Blade Runner<\/em>. And <em>Book of Life<\/em> looked like it had a slip, so now I was thinking I should get that one.<\/p>\n<p>Thanksgiving morning people online started going to Walmart to check out movie prices and selection and reporting back. Officially Walmart&#8217;s Black Friday doesn&#8217;t start until 6 PM on Thanksgiving, but they are open all day and the movie prices drop first thing in the morning. Last year I was able to get <em>Spider-man Homecoming<\/em> in the morning. They had some 4K movies for $8.96 including <em>Deadpool 2<\/em> (which was $14.99 at Best Buy) and disappointingly also had <em>Blade Runner 2049<\/em> on 4K at that price, which I would have gotten if I had known (probably shouldn&#8217;t have opened the movie when I got it in the mail on Wednesday so I could have returned it, but I wasn&#8217;t expecting that). I went to Walmart to pick up a copy of <em>Deadpool 2<\/em>, but they didn&#8217;t have any copies and I couldn&#8217;t even find the movie shippers (turns out they were in the dairy section) and it wouldn&#8217;t matter anyway since they would be wrapped up in shrinkwrap until 6 PM.<\/p>\n<p>I spent the afternoon and early evening at Jeb and Kathy&#8217;s, getting a great meal and getting to meet Clementine and see Mary&#8217;s brothers for the first time since the wedding. Then afterwards I stopped by Best Buy, which was busy but no real crowds, as usual. They had plenty of movies left and I was able to get all of my main picks with slipcovers. And <em>Book of Life<\/em>. And <em>Moonlight<\/em> even had a slipcover, so I got it. I saw <em>Deepwater Horizon<\/em>, but now I wanted to get <em>Deadpool 2<\/em> instead, so I left it. Six movies. And by Thursday I had earned some more rewards points, so I was able to get another $5 certificate. My six movies after using $25 in certificates were only $7.56. I was in and out in about 10 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>After leaving Best Buy around 8 PM, I drove back to Walmart. Their shippers were open, but pretty picked over and it doesn&#8217;t look like they had that many 4K movies in the first place. Once again I didn&#8217;t see any copies of <em>Deadpool 2<\/em>. I drove to another Walmart and found a few copies on the shelves, so I went ahead and got that and was all done. It wasn&#8217;t even Friday yet. And if you wanted anything from Walmart for Black Friday, you needed to have gotten it on Thursday. After setting out to get five movies, I ended up with ten, which is still two fewer than I got last year, so I think I kept it mostly in control. All of the movies came with digital copies except <em>How to Train Your Dragon<\/em>, but I was able to buy a digital copy for that one from Vudu for $2. The other wrinkle to all of this was that last year I bought more movies in December than I bought at Black Friday and even more than that in January.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday-400x225.jpg\" alt=\"Black Friday haul (from Thursday)\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3745\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday-400x225.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday-240x135.jpg 240w, https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday-500x281.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/files\/2018\/11\/blackfriday.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 85vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once again Black Friday is now on Thursday, right after Thanksgiving dinner. So I got to eat a delicious dinner and then drive to Best Buy. This wasn&#8217;t a spur of the moment decision, but the result of a year&#8217;s worth of patience and research. I had been buying a lot of Blu-rays this year, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2018\/11\/black-friday\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Black Friday&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3744"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3748,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions\/3748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}