Thanksgiving in New York

My wife, kids and I went to NYC for Thanksgiving this past week. We had three full busy days of mostly kids related activities. Manhattan is such a great place that whether you are there with kids or just adults like we were last year, there is always plenty to do.

For Thanksgiving, we had a perfect day, my sister got us Macy's grand stand seats so we had a great view of the action. We had a great Thanksgiving feast at St Barts and an enjoyable evening movie in Times Square.

Black Friday in New York was an experience in itself. I got up early to do some store visits (no shopping) to see how Staples stores were doing in the city and then visited the competition (Compusa, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc) before returning to the hotel by 7:30 am to wake the family. It was amazing to see such small city stores (especially Best Buy and Circuit) move sheer tonnage through their small stores in such a short period of time.

Once with family again, we visited Macy's to see Santa. Macy's Santa is an experience every kid should have. Visiting Macy's on Black Friday is an experience any retailer should experience. At 9:00 there must have been 20,000 people in the store. Thing about that number, there were as many people in that store as there was at the TD Banknorth Garden to see Springsteen. As we were leaving, wee passed through the shoe department. There may have been 3 left footed shoes on the shelf and that's about it.

As we walked through the city I had a couple of political thoughts. First, if you kicked every illegal immigrant out of New York, a large portion of the city would disappear and who would fill those jobs? Secondly, when you visit Macy's and Best Buy and see the large $'s being spent and then pass the hordes of homeless on the street you really get the sense that there are two Americas as John Edwards likes to say.

Ok, enough of the political talk for now and back on topic of what a great city New York is. We had such a great few days and suffer from sheer exhaustion from all the walking and then capped the days in the city by watching the kids skate for an hour at Rockefeller Center.

Another great highlight was watching the New York press destroy the New York teams, particularly the Knicks, Yankees and Mets. When we stopped at a restaurant in the Bronx they were showing Dodgers Yankees in 1978 World Series on TV. How great is that that their current teams are so bad they are watching great teams from 30 years ago? (Jets excluded of course.

So those are my musings on New York. Great City, Great times!!!!