Friday night.  This is what we've all been waiting for.  What special stuff would the Northbrook LEGO store have?  Would they have enough of what we wanted?  Of the 260+ people at Brickworld, how many would be there?

The Northbrook Mall closes at 9:00 PM.  The "feeding frenzy" at the LEGO store was scheduled to start at 9:30 and end at midnight.  This would be the first time that the Northbrook store had hosted a special buying time for an AFOL event, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  From my experiences at the LEGO store during Brickfest, I assumed that they would have large quantities of certain sets, old &/or damaged box sets and loads of Pick-A-Brick.

The group I went with to Northbrook on Friday night was Mark, Jeramy and Leah.  We planned to eat on the way there, but we didn't have much time, so we stopped at a Burger King for some fast food.  The people at BK got us our food plenty quick, but we wolfed it down anyway.  I think I spent as much time eating as I did placing my order...and I finished it all...well, except for my drink—I took that with me.  When we got to Northbrook Mall, we had to enter at a certain door, because the mall as a whole had closed.  There was some mall security guy there, and I assume that they had told him to only let people in if they were wearing a BW badge.  When we got to the LEGO store, there was already a line—a BIG line.  I had imagined a group of people similar in size to what I had seen waiting at the Potomac Mills LEGO Store at Brickfest (50-70 people).  But oh no; this line easily had over 100 people already in it.  After we got in line, about 40 more people arrived.  Brian Alano, Brian Darrow, Tom and Alex were also there, so the entire IndyLUG BW contingent was present.

Some store employee started yelling something to us right before they let us enter, but we were so far back in the line that we couldn't make out what he was saying at all.  The message trickled back to us that he had said they were limiting people to 1 Café Corner set.  Soon they opened the doors and started letting people in.  At first I thought that we'd have to wait until the first few people had grabbed their merchandise and checked out before people in our part of the line would be able to fit into the store.  To my surprise the line kept steadily sifting into the doors, and we eventually all fit into the store; we were like sardines in there...but we were in there.

Something that the store did not have was old or damaged sets.  Something that they did have was LOTS of Pick-A-Brick.  I'm talking bushels of pieces.  The normal PAB wall was available, and they had also lined the center of the store with huge totes of pieces.  And from the looks if it, they really knew what kinds of pieces we'd want lots of.  Here's a basic rundown of what was there that night:

2X10 clay orange bricks
2X4 dark green plates
1X6 dark red bricks
1X8 dark red plates
1X2 dark green grill bricks
1X3 clay orange slopes
2X2 ash tiles (I think Jeramy cleaned out the last of these)
6X12 dark red plates
4X8 dark tan plates
2X4 True dark gray bricks
8X2 dark red slopes
8X8 dark red plates
1X1 black plates (I think Alex wiped them completely out of those)
1X3 orange plates
1X3 medium blue plates
1X2 tan Technic bricks with 2 holes

Several people had multiple tubs that they were filling as fast as they could.  The store employees had to make a few trips to the room in the back to bring us more PAB tubs.  I myself just filled one tub that night.  At first I was just tossing the pieces in the tub without stacking them.  After a while I saw that the people I was riding with were taking quite a while stacking their pieces.  I realized that I wasn't leaving any time soon, so I opened my tub and stacked a lot of the pieces so that I could fit a little more in.

There were certain pieces that were obvious favorites.  The 2X4 True dark gray bricks and dark green 1X2 grill bricks went to fast that I didn't even have a chance to grab any.  There were other pieces, such as the 4X8 dark tan plates, that were getting scooped up really fast, but the store had reserves, so they didn't run out.  I think they had about 3 totes each of the 6X12 and 8X8 dark red plates, so everyone got their fill of those with plenty leftover.

Besides the special amounts of PAB, the store had bags from Creator sets at buy-1-get-1-free.  I picked up a couple of the frame bags from the old mosaic sets.  (That bag is the one that has lots of black slopes.)  They also had bags of the Large Spruce Tree set and Small Spruce Tree set.  I'm pretty sure that they also had the bags of 1X1 plates from the old mosaic sets, but someone cleaned them out of those.  I thought that the Clone and Droid battle packs would have been snatched up pretty quickly, but I was easily able to get 1 of each with several still on the shelf.  Other notable sets that I bought that night were the AT-ST, General Grievous' Starfighter, and King's Castle Siege.

Several people went to great lengths to ensure that they had packed the absolute maximum amount of LEGOs into their PAB tubs.  I have to give the honorary medal of PAB tub packing, however, to John Neal.  He was stacking the 2X10 bricks and then pounding them down into the tub.  After he had finished his tubs (at least 2, maybe 3), someone mentioned that the corners had turned white.  John and the rest of us close by looked, and sure enough, the corners of his tubs had those white stress marks that occur when you damage plastic without breaking it.  A store employee lifted 2 of the tubs and was quite surprised at how much they weighed.  I picked one up, and it must've weighed almost 15 pounds.

As the night wore on and midnight approached, I noticed something about the number of IndyLUG members in the store.  People would checkout and leave, so the number of customers in the store was slowly going down, but the number of customers who were IndyLUG members stayed the same.  If I were to chart the percentage of customers in the store who were from IndyLUG versus time, the line would start out low at about 5% (after all we were only 8 people out of the whole mob) and then climb to about 90% by the end.  Let it never be said that IndyLUG AFOLs are not diligent in their frugality for more bricks!

After Friday night at the Northbrook LEGO store was done, I realized something about the wild experience that was different from other crazy retail experiences.  No one got upset.  We didn't have anyone fighting over pieces because they didn't get as many as so-&-so.  No one complained about the long lines for the registers.  Everyone left happy.  There was a very cool and level-headed overall attitude in the crowd.  Yes, we were all full of excitement and greed, but no one got crazy like you sometimes see at Day-after-Thanksgiving sales.  Lets see... don't smoke, high rate of computer literacy, like the same things on pizza as I do, and now "don't get taken over by mob mentality".  The list of good things that make AFOLs stand out from the general populace just keeps growing.

Total for Friday night: $244.96

To be continued...