Shopping legends

I heard an advertisement for a shopping area in KC that opens at midnight Thanksgiving night for shopping. Now that is a weird sale time I could get into. I can do midnight, but 5 am you've lost me there.

The idea of getting up at 3 am to stand in line just doesn't do it for me. I'm not a hard core shopper I guess. I also don't like the idea of fighting for the particular items in question.

I once went to Tuesday Morning (the shop) on their opening day. I had seen a flyer and I wanted a tiffany-style lamp they had advertised and it was on the way to work. I had no idea people lined up to get stuff that first day, and I had no idea they were after the same lamps. People pushed and shoved and ran! At Tuesday Morning in MIssion Kansas on a weekday morning!! I calmly walked down a separate isle found a lamp that was $10 more but the same style and vowed never again. I'm just not a shoving, fighting type shopper. I know it's suppose to be all in the hunt, can't do it.

The odd thing is I do like to go to crowded group events, like the Plaza lighting ceremony in KC with half a million of my closest friends. But at those type of events, I'm just there. I'm not trying to fight anyone in the crowd for a sweater.

Several of us went to London at Christmas back in the mid 90s. I can't remember but I think we arrived the day after Christmas. We decided to go shopping on Oxford street, a major shopping street with big department stores. It was really crowded. Insanely crowded. Not 5 am or anything, just the middle of the afternoon the day after Christmas. They had barricaded the sidewalks so that we couldn't spill over into Oxford Street. We reached a point where no one could walk on the sidewalk. You couldn't get from one store to the next to look around. Finally the police came and moved barricades or something. The next day we say a headline in the newspaper, "Oxford street experiences human gridlock."

So maybe you want to mock me. I don't get up at 5am to fight for deals, but I'll go into a crowd of 100,000 for the heck of it. And just maybe, I'd go to a midnight sale - to watch the crowd!