Black Friday, the most lucrative shopping day of the year for retailers, originated in name from businesses recording their losses in red ink and gains in black-a practice which holds true today, even in accounting software. With stories of human stampedes, grappling for merchandise, and tempers flaring, Black Friday has taken on a whole new meaning for some of us. I witnessed these crowds once and have no desire to venture out there again. I’d be safer inside the polar bear cage at the zoo. No discounted merchandise is worth that.

For the past several years, though, I’ve managed to get great deals without ever having to battle the traffic and crowds. Picture this. The Friday after Thanksgiving, you wake up around 5:00 a.m., grab a cup of coffee and off you go to leisurely shop in your pajamas, getting just about every great deal you set out to purchase that day. The trick to this is online shopping, of course.

Many merchants will have the same great deals online as they do in the stores. The first year I tried this, I was able to purchase everything I had circled in the Black Friday sale ads. After about 30 minutes, I finished shopping with no hassles. The only deals I missed out on by online ordering are the deeply discounted items on clearance that each store offers in order to get rid of them. But, my thoughts on those are that if they are on clearance it means no one else wants them, so I’m probably not missing a thing.

I know that identity theft is a huge problem, but the larger merchants, as well as many of the smaller ones, will have encryption (the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge) such that it would be more likely for someone to steal your wallet that to steal your information online, especially now that a PCI (Payment Card Industry) Standard has been set and merchants are being required to comply with these security measures.

Make sure you do your homework when dealing with any merchants that are not franchise stores and don’t hesitate to ask if they are PCI Certified.

To check for potential Black Friday deals, visit www.dealsofamerica.com and click on the Black Friday link in the upper right of the home page.

How often do we walk by someone and say, “Hi! How are you today?” But, in reality, we secretly don’t want to hear any other response but “Fine, and you?”.

For the most part, many of us have our own problems and don’t want to become involved in helping someone else with theirs. Both me, and a friend of mine are quite the contrary with this. We sincerely care about others and what is going on in their lives. If there’s a riff, or something they can’t handle alone, we don’t mind being the ear they bend. It’s those who don’t want to do anything to help themselves get out of their circumstances that drain us –and believe me, we’ve had our share of those.

Just to test this theory on a small group of people, I recently had a series of personal and family emergencies happen in my life, which to say the least, made life pretty stressful for awhile. As friends and acquaintances would pass by and ask how things were going, I’d start in with something like, “Oh, things have been better…”, or “I’m have a bit of a stressful time now…”, and then lead into everything going on. I found there were a couple of people genuinely interested, but for the most part, you could tell they were itching to get away from me. It was rather amusing and with some, I couldn’t resist the temptation to tell them more when they were trying to escape.

This test confirmed to me that most really aren’t concerned about what is going on in the life of another, unless it is a circumstance that would support nothing other than a reply of, “I’m doing great!”; “I’m fine.”; “Couldn’t be better.”. Anything other than that would involve commitment and perhaps concern from the greeter who initiated, “Hey, how are you today?”

One has to wonder if this is the scenario faced by Australian news anchor, Charmaine Dragun, before voluntarily plunging to her death after receiving the biggest, most exciting promotion of her 29 years of life. A comment in the Daily Telegraph stated that people are now wondering if, “…we should have taken more interest in what was going on in her life”. You think?