Blonde Box of Rocks and I braved Buckhead on black friday this year. Initially I was annoyed because the valet at the front was all full by the time we got there at noon, but much to my amusement we got the last spot at the valet at Neiman Marcus and enjoyed laughing at the leased Range Rover full of niggresses waiting behind me bitching at the (black) valet.

We cleared our entire gift list for ourselves and for family in one 7-hour marathon trip. I don't know what the final bag count was, but I would estimate it was somewhere in the 15-20 range, not counting the card/gift receipt/stocking stuffer notice for ordering a purse from Coach and the 5th trip to Bloomingdales that I put directly into one of our four other Bloomingdales bags. All in all it was an enjoyable experience as we ran into a number of friends from college and high school and were able to knock it all out in one fell swoop.

One interesting note was that even the upscale shopping had creative discount plans. Bloomingdales, for example, was offering a $15 gift card (that was good from Black Friday till December 24th) for every $100 spent in the store. Even purchases made with the gift cards counted toward redemption (so we spent $350 initially, received $45 of giftcards, and when we spent them we got another $15 giftcard.) The catch was that you had to take the receipt to a separate table to redeem it, so that you effectively received a 15% discount on your next purchase. It seemed to be worth it, because we ended up grabbing a lot of gifts there and wound up leaving with a $15 card which I gave to my mother, who will then proceed to spend money there she otherwise wouldn't have.

Even the Apple store was discounting (most of it was pretty nominal... I think the Apple TV we bought was normally $329 and we ended up paying $309+tax.) It seemed like everything in the $300+ range had a $20 discount.