I shop for a living. Here's what I bought on Black Friday.

And how I feel about it 5 years into Gee Thanks!

When I was younger, I’d patiently wait for my cousins to finish their Thanksgiving pie. Then, I’d nonchalantly sidle up to them, pretending I’d just had a brilliant, spur-of-the-moment idea. “What if we go to Target when it opens at 11 PM?” I’d exclaim.

Of course, it was only 7:30 PM, and we’d be leaving my aunt’s house well before 8 PM.

“We’ll all go home,” I’d suggest, unveiling a plan I’d been meticulously plotting all day but pretending was totally improvised. “I’ll pick you up later, or we can just meet there.”

But only one year did my persuasive tactics actually work. I think we were 18 or 19. and home from college for the holiday. We made it to Target at 11:02 PM, and, feeling incredibly overwhelmed and incredibly broke despite the deals, we ended up buying ourselves pairs of gloves for $3 each—a doorbuster deal.

Other years, I’d go alone—still broke, still overwhelmed, but completely swept up in the hype of snagging a good discount. There was the year I scored a Nikon CoolPix camera and the year I got an iPod Touch (for the record, I bought both with a credit card I didn’t entirely understand how to use) (I paid for that in more ways than one and learned many crucial financial lessons!).

I loved—and to this day still love—the hustle and bustle of people joyfully preparing for the holiday season. Even if it means snagging a television for half off at 2 AM, because capitalism is the backbone of American society—and what’s more American than the mythical lore of Thanksgiving followed by camping out at Best Buy? Not much.

When I launched Gee Thanks! on Black Friday 2019, it scratched all of my itches. I wanted to shop, I wanted to know what other people were buying, and I wanted to help other people shop. Since then, I have written dozens of gift guides. I haven’t taken a single day off from posting Instagram stories in three years—a fact I find, frankly, terrifying and something I should probably make an effort to remedy in 2025—and I have bought countless products and been sent even more from PR teams. I tell my friends to bring tote bags whenever they come over to my house so they can leave with sunscreen, conditioner, perfume, leather purses, jewelry, and pantry staples. It’s the best job, but it has also—unfortunately—tried hard to suck out all of the fun of the Black Friday deal for me personally. For Gee Thanks!, Black Friday starts the day after Labor Day. That’s when I start finding out about what the discounts are going to be, planning content, looking through the year’s bestsellers to create the Geezer-Approved list, and looking through all of my purchases to figure out what I bought this past year and loved enough to call it a favorite.

So what does someone who shops for a living actually buy on Black Friday? (Also reminder that my birthday is November 27 so Black Friday is my annual chance for me to really lose myself in the music, the moment, I ow—)

Let’s go through my order emails — and yes, most, if not all of these products are still on sale for Cyber Monday!