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What a morning!  
 
There were a few items that my kids spotted in the Future Shop and Wal-Mart Boxing Day sale flyers, so we were up at 5:30, eager to get the stuff they wanted.  
 
Man, I saw some amazing things.  
 
First of all, the crowd at Future Shop was even bigger than last year. Almost every square foot of floor space in the store was jammed with people less than five minutes after the door opened. But the getting in was the easy part. Assuming you could find what you were looking for, it took up to an hour to make it through the cashier check-out.  
 
Last year, I swore I would never go to Future Shop again after they advertised a super-low cost computer system, but hadn't put them out on the floor.  
 
This year, it was something else. They had advertised a high-quality dvd player (regular price around $400) for something like $50 - a huge discount. They were all snapped up within a couple of minutes after the store opened. The problem was that, when the purchasers got to the till (after standing an hour in line) they found out that the price on the flyer was a typo and the price was actually $350, not $50. The Future Shop manager refused to honour the price in their own flyer, but theye didn't make any announcement over the main speakers. They just let people stand in line, thinking that they had a hot bargain in their hands. I heard a lot of yelling from pist-off customers. I heard words that you only usually hear inside a locker room.  
 
At Wal-Mart, something even more bizarre happened. There were about 200 of us lined up outside the "IN" door at about 7:45. (My daughter really wanted a digital camera that was on sale in the flyer).  
 
We're all standing their, freezing our butts off, when a big guy walks up to the door and asks the security guard for a wheelchair for his wife. After the guard gives him a Wal-Mart wheelchair, he goes back to his car and comes back with a woman who looks like a quadraplegic. She isn't moving at all. Her head is hanging to one side and her eyes have that glazed over look. The man pushes the wheelchair right up to the doors and people got out of the way for this poor woman.  
 
Here's where the fun starts.  
 
The man and the disabled woman are at the front of line when the doors are unlocked. There is a huge rush of humanity and I lost sight of the woman in the wheelchair.  
 
Five minutes later I saw the wheelchair, abandoned, in an aisle. A couple of aisles over, the "quadraplegic" woman and her husband are pushing a cart with a big screen TV in it, shopping to their hearts' content. It was, to the say the least, a miraculous recovery.  
 
If I had a camera on me at the time, I would have taken before and after photos and posted them on ebrandon.  
 
Who says that miracles don't happen at Christmas?