A very good friend did a kindness to me and the family on Thanksgiving day.

He discovered that the desktop computer we intended to buy at Best Buy (got it? BEST BUY!) on Black Friday at 5 a.m. (yeah, we got swept up in the consumer frenzy) was actually available for sale early Thanksgiving morning online.

(Sweet machine–HP Pavillion, quad-core, 1TB hard disk, 3GB RAM, 20″ monitor, printer, etc.–for $599.)

Friend put one in his online shopping cart and called us to see if we wanted to him to go ahead with the purchase and ship it to us. I said, “Great! Do that, and I’ll send you a check.”

He gave BB his credit card number. Here’s the receipt he got:

Then he waited. And waited.

After 10 days, he got the monitor and printer. A few days later he called to see how the rest of the order was coming.

It wasn’t.

“Oversold” was the excuse. Friend asked what to do about the monitor and printer he got. “Oh, well, if you got those then you will get your computer,” he was told.

He waited a few more days before calling again. “Oversold”, he was told, and before he could mention the monitor and printer again, he was told his credit card had been credited back for the full price of the package, and that was that.

At that point, Friend decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

So–Friend ends up with free monitor and printer for his trouble, we don’t get our desktop computer, and Best Buy shows ONCE AGAIN that their doorbuster Black Friday deals are not much more than a scam.

(That’s all right, in a way. I kinda wanted to build a new machine on our own anyway.)