Canada’s New Black Friday Puts Us In The Red

Of all the great and wonderful things that the U.S. has exported to Canada, I’m sorry to say that Black Friday isn’t one of them.  This is the first year that retail stores have actively promoted Black Friday sales here.  The good news is that Paulette and I took advantage of some very good deals and put a massive dent in our Christmas shopping list.  The bad news is we’ve gone from ‘black to red’!!

Black Friday door openings in Toronto – crazy, crazy people!

Our normal ‘Black Friday’ shopping day here in Canada has always been Boxing Day – the day after Christmas.  Judging by the number of stores that were promoting Black Friday, it looks like Boxing Day will still be #1 in Canada as far as shopping days go.  However, for what we were looking for in gifts for our family, it turned out to be a pretty good deal.  Let’s just say we got all the major items finished!

Future Shop’s sale on iPads netted me a $45 refund!

I even managed to get a $45 rebate on the iPad 4 I bought the other day at Future Shop.  I paid $499 for mine and they were on sale yesterday at Future Shop for $455.  I took my bill in and they gladly refunded me $45 under their 30 day price protection program.  Apple normally doesn’t put iPads on sale so out of curiosity I checked their site and found they did have a sale with a savings of $41.

While at Future Shop I happened to pick up a couple of pretty good deals myself.  One was a 32GB Lexar Flash Drive (V10) for less than half-price at $15. 

Why do I need a 32GB Flash Drive?  Lots of good uses for this but one is it will hold 6 full DVD movies.

The other real bargain was a SanDisk Ultra 16GB Class 10 SDHC Memory Card for just $10 – this card normally sells for around $40. 

Back to Canada’s Black Friday for a minute and the reason why retailers here have decided to give it a go.  The Bank of Montreal (BMO) estimates that Canadians spend as much as $20 billion at American retailers annually. As much as $5 billion of that is in November and December with a good chunk of that being spent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

Last year, in Palm Springs on Black Friday, Paulette tried single-handedly to restore the entire U.S. economy!

With the Loonie at or near par with the U.S. dollar and recent significant increases in the amount of goods we are allowed to bring in from the U.S. after just 24 hours, Canadian retailers are anxious to keep as much money here at home as they can.  Hey, I’ve got news for them – after our shopping was done yesterday, it felt like we’d contributed about a billion dollars to the Canadian economy!

Have a great Saturday, and thanks again for visiting!