01938: Offshore Black Friday Madness


We do not celebrate Thanksgiving here, thus we do not officially have the Black Friday retail "holiday" that immediately follows it every year. This has not stopped SM Malls from hosting their own Thanksgiving sale and the local outlets for Forever 21 have declared that they have some sort of a Black Friday sale as well. Quite frankly it's ridiculous, but there's not much that we can do about how we tend to look to the US for everything, including crazy reasons to go on sale I suppose.

I previously wrote about the new Kindle Voyage and how enticing it seems as a Kindle user. I've been holding off for more reviews of the device and possibly a deal to save on buying the device in order to finally replace my rather aged Kindle 3 (Keyboard). I had resisted a prior sale for the Kindle Paperwhite some time back - they were celebrating something like national reading day or something silly like that. But I finally gave in when I went through Amazon's early Black Friday deals last night.

The Kindle Paperwhite was once again $20 off. And while the Kindle Voyage is said to be quite the superior reading device, the price jump is pretty intense. And a lot of reviews seem to boil down to the question of how much money do you have to throw away on an eReader. Getting the Voyage is a nice experience, no doubt. But it still costs a lot of money. And the Paperwhite still offers a pretty solid reading experience on its own. And so I gave in and got one.

In addition, I also picked-up a number of Blu-Ray movies and TV shows since they were ridiculously on sale. Some purchases were due to sheer naked desire - in this case wanting the Blu-Ray remasters of Star Trek: The Next Generation or a nice copy of The Cornetto Trilogy. Some were for gifting purposes, like getting Tobie The Dark Knight Trilogy: Ultimate Collector's Edition as an early Christmas gift that might arrive after the holidays due to the nature of the Balikbayan box network and the frustrations of the Manila Bay port congestion. And there were nostaligia purchases like Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series.

Beyond BSG being a great show, it was also one of our first bonding points when Tobie and I were first getting to know one another. We'd schedule virtual viewing sessions over IM and "watch" the episode together and shared our commentary via IM as well. This was the last arc of the fourth season, you see, and thus things were coming to a head. And it was a great time to be a BSG fan and to find a fellow fan to watch the show with.

And Tobie and I continue to watch a lot of shows together - but that's how we enjoy things. And this is why I'm always looking for more time to share with Tobie to watch such shows and enjoy the media experience together.

But damn, I spent a lot last night for things that I may not see until the next shipment from the Tobie's brother in the US arrives some time next year. If we're lucky, they'll come home for the holidays and will have some of these items in their luggage or something. That would be totally awesome.

We may not have Thanksgiving or Black Friday here, but the joy of online shopping and the increasingly global nature of the market means that we get to take advantage of some of the deals anyway.

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