The Marden’s lady lets you in on her secrets of surviving Black Friday
By JEFF INGLIS | November 20, 2007
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If anyone in Maine knows how to shop with gusto, it’s the Marden’s lady. You’ve seen her all over the TV — you may have even seen her around town. The woman knows how to spot bargains, values, deals, and great items like nobody else in the state.She doesn’t give out her name because of “trouble with paparazzi,” but we managed to find her, which led right into one of her problems: “One of my hardest things about shopping is the people that follow me because I am not only glamorous and a sex symbol, but they know I’m a consummate shopper. Sometimes I go in disguise.”
The Portland Phoenix convinced her to take a break from shopping in a quiet part of town, and got her to share her thoughts on how to survive — and even to thrive — on Black Friday.
ADVANCE PREPARATION
“You gotta start early,” she says. “Like about a week and a half, two weeks in advance, you gotta start stocking up on the mini-marshmallows. ... You start drinking cocoa and you think of everything you can stick ’em in. Load the sugar on, because from here on out, it’s gonna be a sprint.”
She also observes that you might not be able to fit everything you buy into your car at once, and advises: “Get a few rental storage units, strategically placed between shopping areas, so you can drop off what you’ve got and go on to the next place. All you gotta do is rent ’em for a week.”
THE DAY BEFORE
“You don’t ever want to eat turkey on Thanksgiving. All that tactrotactlycicerin or trychtelactin, everything that slows everybody down. ... The goal is to get speeded up. My mantra is ‘Caffeine, caffeine, caffeine, burn, baby, burn.’ ... Tofu turkey is never okay. I’ve eaten enough tofu in my life to know that. ... The bottom line of Thanksgiving is to stay away from things with feathers. If the Pilgrims had stayed away from everything with feathers, there’d be a lot more Native Americans here today.”
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