One day till Thanksgiving, it's game time. It's the most competitive time of year to shop, particularly if you want to acquire groceries before the big day, due to customers storing up on holiday meal supplies and Black Friday specials.
Costco is a popular Thanksgiving fixture and offers great Black Friday prices, but buyers are reporting long queues outside their warehouses and staff say Christmas things are selling fast.
A Tucson consumer posted a video of a two-day-before Thanksgiving Costco queue that wrapped around the large superstore. Not everyone would wait in this line, with some sharing their Costco experiences and others saying nothing would be worth the torture of being packed in with so many other buyers.
Last Tuesday, I visited a Costco in Lancaster, California.Zero parking. Shopper commiserated, "The whole parking lot!"
Different opinions were expressed: "There is nothing Costco has that would motivate me to stand in line that long," and "The way I would simply cancel Thanksgiving."
Some worried about Costco employees. "I could only imagine how much suffering the workers are experiencing at that warehouse," a poster said. Costco's staff noted their Thanksgiving sales this week: "The Costco I work at [sold] 650 pumpkin pies in an hour."
There were several suggestions for skipping lines, including arriving "30 minutes before closing" on weekdays and arriving "30-200 minutes after it rains heavily," especially if you live in a place where it rarely rains and people avoid running errands then.
So, if you haven't checked out Costco's holiday discounts yet, wait until after Thanksgiving and check out smaller businesses with less people. However, Tucson's big line's original poster claims the wait wasn't as severe as it appeared.
"The line moved pretty fast, they just had to organize the crowd," said. "Only really 5 minutes of waiting, but I got worried there for a second."