For those of you who don't know what Black Friday is, a little background first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... target='_blank'>From Wikipedia

Black Friday (also called Blitz Day), the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, is historically one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year. Many consider it the "official" beginning to the Christmas shopping season.

The "black" in the name comes from the standard accounting practice of using red ink to denote negative values (i.e., losses) and black ink to denote positive values (profits).

Black Friday is the day when retailers traditionally get back "in the black" after operating "in the red" for the previous months. The term may also be used by retail employees to express their antipathy towards it, as an analogy to Black Thursday as a day of general chaos.

Although Black Friday is typically the busiest shopping day of the year in terms of customer traffic, it is not typically the day with the highest sales volume. That is usually either the last Saturday before Christmas or December 23.

Now that we got the definition out of the way, here are some places that keep up with all the specials that are available on that day.

http://blackfriday.gottadea... target='_blank'>Black Friday at GottaDeal.com
(site was online but is now down since being featured on Cnn.com today)

Black Friday 2005

Plus- is Wal-Mart selling http://news.com.com/Will+Wa... target='_blank'>$398 notebooks?

I myself had a taste of that after-Thanksgiving shopping a few years ago. Somehow (I think cheesecake was involved) I was talked into waking up at 4 a.m. in order to shop with a group of friends and family. It was all well planned. We were going to separate and conquer the major retailers in town. We each had a list of items to look for at the store we were assigned to. So there I was at 5 a.m. with my sister lined up against the wall at Target, list of items in hand. We weren't the only ones there that early. Pretty soon about 300 and more joined us. Once the store opened the crowd was pretty decent, no pushing or shoving. Things weren't so friendly over at Wal-Mart though. I heard the crowds can get pretty rough there. Maybe that's why I was given the Target task, me being a rookie and all.

Even though I didn't buy anything for myself (got my husband a Mattel classic baseball handheld video game) I had fun. However I don't think I'll be waking up that early again to go shopping. I don't even like going later in the day because the stores are too crowded for me. I'll stick to the online deals.

How about you? Have any interesting shopping stories?