The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

It’s Tuesday, Nov. 3 as I write this; the day this paper goes to press.

Yesterday I got an email from Amazon announcing new “countdown to Black Friday” deals. “It’s never too early for a good deal,” the email says. I completely agree. And it’s never too late either.

So the message is, if you simply can’t wait until the day after Thanksgiving to do your Christmas shopping a month before Christmas, why not get on Amazon.com now and do your Christmas shopping two months (almost) before Christmas.

But by sending me that email, Amazon clearly missed something important about my shopping habits: The chances of me Christmas shopping the week after Halloween are about the same as the chances of me doing my taxes in January, or writing this column a couple of days early. These things wouldn’t occur to me.

What’s odd about this though is that Amazon, in so many ways, knows my shopping habits better than I do.

One day recently, I was vacuuming up dead flies around the house (because it was early fall and still warm – not even remotely like Christmas). And I was having to continually unplug the shop vac I was using and plug it back in.

So in my ongoing quest to reduce annoyance in my life, I got on Amazon to see how much a cordless shop vac would cost. Too much, it turned out, when you add the cost of the battery, which doesn’t come with it for some reason. The battery costs nearly twice what the batteryless shop vac costs and about five times what my little plug-in mini-vac cost. I haven’t looked since – I’ll deal with the cord. But I digress.

The point is that for the next two weeks nearly every web site I visited had an ad at the side of it for cordless shop vacs (sans battery, of course). I often get emails from Amazon offering me special deals on things I might want. And they are sometimes useful, such as books or movies similar to ones I already purchased. Amazon knows what I want.

But Amazon can forget about me Christmas shopping in November. It ain’t happening.

And by the way, Black Friday is also Christmas Kickoff day in Dayton. All the retailers around here will be open for business, so if you’re up for Christmas shopping on Black Friday, that’s the place to do it. And even if you’re not, it’s a lot of fun anyway.