Or how I sur­vived the 6AM Crush at Walmart

I had planned to score a new TV, once I got back to PR. I fig­ured “Black Fri­day” would be the best time to do it. I got to the Wal­mart near Coamo, right at 6AM. I’ve been to this par­tic­u­lar Wal­mart about a half a dozen times and I have NEVER seen it as packed as it was on Fri­day morning.

Park­ing was just short of impos­si­ble and they have your typ­i­cal over­size Wal­mart park­ing lot (with lots of secu­rity run­ning around). I did miss the 2AM to 6AM feed­ing frenzy, but the after­math was still present… they were just start­ing to tear down the ‘crowd stag­ing area’ for those folks wait­ing in line since before 2AM.

I tried to get into the elec­tron­ics depart­ment, but the line snaked in and around and com­pletely back out of the depart­ment. For­tu­nately, the plasma TV I was after, was in a dis­play out on the floor. Even with sales tax, I got a good price. I was not the only one cart­ing off a big screen TV. These things were fly­ing out the door.

With all the traf­fic in and around Wal­mart, you would not know Puerto Rico’s econ­omy had been ham­mered hard over the last 2 years or that it had dou­ble digit unemployment.

Dish­Net­work seems pretty pop­u­lar too!

I had planned to stop by RadioShack on the way back into Coamo, but the line was still out the front door, at 7AM. I did make it back around 11AM since I had to buy an HDMI cable, which cost WAY TO MUCH. RadioShack makes a killing on “parts and pieces”.

I would be remiss, if I did not men­tion how friendly and help­ful the staff were at both stores, even with the “shop­ping crush”.

Was this “Black Fri­day” repeated all over the island? I don’t know, but sus­pect it was. I never made it to Sears…

The point I’m try­ing to make is that Puerto Rico is not that much dif­fer­ent from the rest of the US. Sure, they mostly speak Span­ish. But they buy iPods, Xboxes, Wii’s, fancy wheels for their cars, and lots and lots of fur­ni­ture, just like the rest of the US.

Boricua’s are very fash­ion con­scious, with their own sense of style.

Travel Update: I made the flight into San Juan with­out much has­sle. I turned over the Isuzu parts I bought in Anchor­age, to the mechanic here in Coamo and they had me back on the road the next day. Labor was fair and the ser­vice was good. Now I have a work­ing speedome­ter. DOH! That just leaves a very slight radi­a­tor leak to fix… no biggie.

My next Post will be PR travel related, now that I’m set­tled in.

Copy­right © 2009~2012 RobertosPuertoRico.com, All Comm. Rights Reserved, CC3, ShareAlike