I'm writing this on a laptop I got at Wal-Mart for a song. I stood in line for an early holiday doobuster sale. It wasn't a crazy, pitch-a-tent outside of Best Buy the night before type of door buster sale. Those tents, winding around stores on cold Thanksgiving nights, are the Hoovervilles of today, except instead of stirring up potato soup in old coffee tins, the people are drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee and waiting to buy a Panasonic 42'' Plasma HDTV for what it cost my immigrant grandfather to buy his first American house.
My doorbuster experience was simpler. The sale started at 8am, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I arrived at 6am, got in the store, stood around for two hours. It was quite an experience.
The guy in front of me said he did this thing all the time. "But my brother's worse," he said. "He goes to Chick-Fil-A grand openings. They give away a hundred free boxes of 52 free sandwich coupons -- that's free lunch every week for a year!" He said it with such enthusiasm that I couldn't tell if he was jealous of his brother or he thought his brother was a lunatic.
"He's been to five of these things," he said. I did the math in my head. Assuming this brother was one of the first 100 in line, he had over 250 coupons for free Chick-Fil-A sandwiches. He could eat a chicken sandwich every day for lunch, excluding weekends, and hardly have to buy lunch all year. Imagine, I wondered, the savings you could get if you didn't have to buy your lunch for an entire year!
It began to make sense to me. That's what happens to you when you're in line for a doorbuster. When you're at home, watching on TV, the people in line seem like idiots, mammon-worshippers, dorks and dufists and, I feel terrible saying this, the type of people who put their povery on parade. But wait a second, I began to think while standing in the line waiting for the sale so I could save $175 on my laptop, this an odd mixture, a weird equation of people buying really expensive things but standing in modern-day soup lines to get them.
But that doesn't explain the Chick-Fil-A enthusiasts. The Lord works in mysterious ways. In His wisdom, he has given us chicken sandwich zealots to make those who stand in line for electronics at least feel a little sane.
Anyway, I like their ads.
