Thanksgiving Sales

I've never really gotten into the Black Friday thing. This Christmas, however, there was something I wanted that was going on deep discount (a little cheaper than ebay) at Michael's.

Carol and Jim bought me a Cricut for my birthday this year. It's essentially a programmable machine that cuts shapes out of card stock. We've been cutting out letters and shapes, giving them to Dalton with a glue stick, and he has been making cards for the grandparents. For Dalton, it's mostly about the glue, but he enjoys the letters and shapes as well.

Given how much Dalton enjoys arts and crafts, I was thinking that we would have him make our holiday cards this year. Cricut has a couple of different cartridges that facilitate the cutting of holiday shapes. I wanted to acquire one of these for our card making experience.

So Cricut has a real racket going. First they charge you an arm and a leg for the original machine. Then they continue to hit you up for pricey accessories and consumables. The worst of these are the font and shape cartridges. These things are basically software upgrades for the machine. They list for $90 each. The sell for $90 at Michael's most of the time and they are excluded from most sales and coupons. They run $65 at Walmart and $30-35 on ebay. I'd been dusting off my ebay account to purchase a holiday cartridge, but hadn't yet put in any bids when Cathy suggested that Michael's would have some sort of sale for Thanksgiving.

It turns out that Michael's first sale was on Thanksgiving with the doors opening at 6pm. The cartridges were running $30 each. I arrived at 5:50pm and was 7th in line behind young to middle aged women all talking about Cricut cartridges. Over the next ten minutes, the line extended behind me into the parking lot. This led to a building nervousness that I might not get that holiday cartridge. I was definately wondering how orderly the entire process would be.

As it turned out, everyone was good natured and friendly. While I did end up with a bloody nose, it didn't bleed all that long. They had plenty of the cartridges and I did get one with holiday shapes as well as one that does animals and one that has a font with lower case letters for teaching Dalty.

If you read this post, you're likely to recieve a card hand made by Dalty (with some help) in the near future.