Photo courtesy of Carlyle Group

I interviewed Carlyle Group’s Sandra Horbach, who heads the private equity giant’s consumer and retail group, at the Women’s Alternative Investment Summit in New York last week. I shared a few highlights, and since the session drew terrific audience feedback, it’s worth giving you more of Horbach’s smart talk about managing through the recession, investing into the recovery, and navigating a career in private equity, where few women dare to tread.–Patricia Sellers

If you had to hand over your job to someone else tomorrow, what would you tell them?

Horbach: Be really good to your people. Develop a vision. Inspire confidence because at the end of the day, they must follow you. Listen well, and give them the resources and developmental tools they need. One of the things we do not do well in private equity is develop junior talent.

What’s the lesson of the last couple of years?

Horbach: Bubble bursts, for sure. There is too much of a good thing. There was too much leverage and not enough checks and balances.

Did you make investment decisions you shouldn’t have?

Horbach: We bought a company called Oriental Trading that had 30 years of predictable growth. It’s a direct marketer, and it had years of success and dividends and free cash flow. It looked like the most predictable business you could buy. But there was a dramatic shift in the industry. The U.S. Postal Service, which is essentially bankrupt because of the Internet, raised the price for catalogs 20% in one year. When you mail 350 million catalogs, that’s a very big nut to swallow. We had to take a lot of costs out of the business. We’re not going to have stellar returns. But in general, Carlyle stayed away from the mega-deals in the ‘07 time frame. Knock on wood, we have a very solid portfolio.

You bought Dunkin’ Brands for $2.5 billion in 2006 from a liquor company, Pernod Ricard (PDRDY), where it had been orphaned. How is Dunkin’s strategy now shifting?

Horbach: We went on an aggressive expansion plan. Since we bought the company, we’ve given the cash flows back to the business. We’ve doubled EBITDA.  We’ve added almost 2,500 new stores in the U.S. alone. For every Dunkin’ Donuts store we open, we create 25 jobs.

In a tough category–competing against McDonald’s (MCD) and Starbucks (SBUX).

Horbach: We hold our own. We’re No. 1 in coffee. We’re also investing internationally.  Most people would be surprised to know that Baskin-Robbins has 4000 stores outside the U.S. Dunkin’ Donuts has several thousands. We just opened our first 20 stores in China.

There’s a belief that the consumer is never going back to the level of spending of the past. So, how do you deal with that?

Horbach: The consumer sector accounts for two-thirds to 70% of our economy. You can’t ignore it. We’re shifting to areas where consumers have to spend. Retailers that are value-oriented can still be very attractive. You look for great brands that are under-penetrated. We own a brand called Philosophy, a personal-care business, and we’re growing our top line double digits as we expand distribution and grow awareness–in a very tough economy. You have to pick your spots.

Philosophy is the last company you bought. That was in 2007. Why have you not acquired anything since then?

Horbach: We looked at a lot of things, But credit dried up completely. You couldn’t even find a banker. They wouldn’t return your phone calls. And we weren’t sure where the bottom was. No one was. Now we’re seeing multi-billion deals with high levels of leverage, at attractive rates. We’re back in business. We’re excited about playing offense again.

Do you feel confident that we’ve hit bottom?

Horbach: I believe that we’ve hit bottom.

What have you learned from Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM (IBM), who is on the Carlyle investment committee?

Horbach: I talk to Lou a lot. His office is right next to mine. Very early on, Lou and several other members of our senior team were very aggressive about how bad it was going to get. “You have to take action now! You have to start cutting now! You have to evaluate your CEOs!” He said, “There are good-time CEOs and bad-time CEOs.” Good-time CEOs look good when the market is going up and everyone is acquiring things. But they don’t look so good when markets do down. We probably turned over 40% of our CEOs.

What is Lou saying now?

Horbach: Six months ago, Lou said, ‘Okay, now we have to start playing offense.” So, we are. The management teams that start to play offense will be so much better positioned when things start to pick up.

So you’re not looking for good-time CEOs yet, but rather, hybrid CEOs?

Horbach: Well, none of us expect a robust revenue environment. We’re calling it “the revenue-less recovery.” We’re thinking that there’s going to be a lot of M&A activity. Everyone is looking for share and global opportunities.

How might the private-equity industry attract more women?

Horbach: In order to be successful at anything, you have to love what you do. I think a lot of women have gone into private equity because it’s the right thing to do, or they think, “I’m going to make a lot of money.” Hedge funds, same sort of thing. Women have to step back and know what skills they need.

So, what are those skills?

Horbach: You have to be able to work in a very male-oriented environment and not take it personally. Women have to be adaptable–actually, that’s a strength women bring. But you need to be tough. You need to speak your mind. And you have to be realistic about how hard it is. Women often think that when they’re doing a great job, people will notice. Women don’t self-promote as much as men do. You have to network. And if you’re doing great work, make sure that your bosses notice.

The Fortune Most Powerful Women isn’t only about Fortune 500 bosses and world-renowned business builders like Oprah Winfrey.

Today we unveil a new program and annual list called Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs. It’s the right time to broaden the power base of the MPWomen community and honor outstanding builders of start-ups across the U.S. Small business, besides employing more than half of the U.S. workforce, is the main engine of the economic recovery.

To seek MPWomen Entrepreneur nominees, Fortune and our partner in this new venture, American Express (AXP)–specifically, its OPEN card division, which serves small business–reached out to various sources, including the Small Business Administration and participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Wellpoint (WLP) CEO Angela Braly, Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne, and eBay (EBAY) Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington are among the leaders who suggested candidates. From a field of 65, we elected 10 to honor this year.

All 10 winners participated in the MPWomen Summit this past September and were feted at a reception where the guests included Warren Buffett. He’s one of the few guys who comes to the Summit, and his company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), happens to employ some outstanding female CEOs. Buffett introduced a MPWomen Entrepreneurs panel that featured several of the 2009 winners, along with SBA Administrator Karen Mills.

FEED Projects co-founders Lauren Bush (left) and Ellen Gustafson. Photo courtesy of FEED Projects.

Over the next two weeks here on Postcards, we’ll tell you about four of this year’s MPWomen Entrepreneurs. Today, we’re introducing you to Lauren Bush and Ellen Gustafson, the co-founders of FEED Projects. They raise money and awareness for the UN World Food Programme by selling eco-friendly burlap tote bags and backpacks. FEED’s partners include Whole Foods (WFMI), Barnes & Noble (BKS), Amazon (AMZN), Kenneth Cole (KCP), and Bobbi Brown, the cosmetic marketer that is part of Estee Lauder (EL).

Fortune and American Express chose FEED because we’re impressed with their social relevance: Since they started in 2007, FEED has raised over $5 million to buy more than 50 million school meals for children in the developing world. We’re also struck by FEED’s innovative branding. A big FEED stamp and a numeral mark every FEED bag, signifying the type of donation that the consumer has made by purchasing the bag.

Bush and Gustafson serve meals to children in Kenya with the UN World Food Programme. Photo courtesy of FEED Projects.

Bush, who is the niece of President George W., and Gustafson are 25 and 29 years old, respectively–so FEED, of course, is active on Facebook and Twitter. But the MPWomen Entrepreneurs’ ingenuity in communicating with consumers serves as a model for any marketer eager to go beyond the norm in social networking.

Here’s Lauren Bush on how FEED got started and what she’s learned about building a business:

Click here to see me talking about the Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs initiative and to find out which other companies we’re honoring this year.

by Jessica Shambora

“He is a role model not only for how to play baseball but also for how to remain atop the wobbly pedestal of fame.”

– Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, who wrote this week’s cover story about Derek Jeter, captain of the world-champion New York Yankees and SI’s 2009 Sportsman of the Year.

Kudos to Jeter. He stands in stark contrast to the only athlete in history who has received SI’s highest honor twice. That would be Tiger Woods, Sportsman of the Year in 1996 and in 2000.

Until this week, it seemed that Tiger and Jeter have a lot in common. They’re both sponsored by Procter & Gamble’s (PG) Gillette and Pepsico’s (PEP) Gatorade. Both have lavish Florida homes. Now we learn that they even share friends: The New York Post reported today that Tiger met Rachel Uchitel–the woman who sparked the controversy over his extramarital liaisons–at Jeter’s Trump World Plaza apartment in Manhattan.

I’ve taken particular interest in TigerGate (more than most people, I bet) because I interviewed Tiger last fall in Asheville, North Carolina, near the site of his first North American course design. It was a thrill. Especially since I had recently left a post at Travel+Leisure Golf magazine to join Fortune. I grew up playing golf.  I also went to high school across the street from Stanford when Tiger was a student there and on the verge of becoming a phenomenon.

Am I surprised by the stories about Tiger? Yes. Not that he was capable of the behavior that’s been reported, but that he acted that way and got caught. Tiger, after all, is all about control. He doesn’t use Twitter. He doesn’t get involved in politics. He guards his privacy and his image so fiercely that he wouldn’t even tell me which business greats he most admires.

Now the stories swirling around him deprive him of his precious control.

Back to Jeter, another paragon of discipline and focus–as Pattie wrote in a recent post about “situational awareness.” As SI crowns the Yankee shortstop this year’s model sportsman and we hold him up as one of our earthly gods, let’s not forget that he’s human too.

And let’s recognize that one of the reasons we like Jeter so much is because he too seems to know that he’s human. He tells SI: “What makes me angry is when people don’t care–not when they fail; everybody fails–or when people act like they don’t care.” He’s not perfect, and he understands the responsibility he carries. “You have one opportunity to do something,” he says, “and you never know if you’re going to get that opportunity again.”

With Comcast (CMCSA) finalizing its deal to buy 51% of NBC Universal from General Electric (GE), skeptics are asking: Why would Comcast CEO Brian Roberts put his faith in Jeff Zucker, the NBCU chief who has dragged the NBC broadcast network from first to fourth place?

Because Jeff Zucker is one of the most determined, driven, ambitious, ingenious, competitive, compelling, resilient people you will ever meet.

Read “Life imitates TV,” a Fortune profile I wrote two years ago.

This is a guy who battled cancer twice. The first time, he was 31. Zucker, who is now 44, used to schedule his chemotherapy sessions at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Friday afternoons and then sleep all weekend, so he could work like a maniac at NBC starting on Monday morning.

His cancer recurred two years later. His wife, Caryn, was four months pregnant with their second child. Doctors removed 90% of his colon. Beating cancer, Zucker told me, “prepared me for almost anything.”

When Jack Welch was running GE, he was a Zucker fan. Dick Ebersol, the  influential head of NBC Universal Sports, has long been Zucker’s cheerleader–and his sway endures in this Comcast deal. Most critically, Jeff Immelt, GE’s current chief, has backed Zucker through good times and bad.

Two years ago, when I asked him about Zucker’s failure to prop up the NBC broadcast network, Immelt said: “I really don’t blame Jeff. I don’t accept it, but I don’t blame him.” He noted that Zucker, who has been at NBC for 23 years, inherited aging shows.

Indeed, NBC’s primetime profits, which peaked at $650 million in 2003, have dried up. But what counts more is that Zucker has impressively built NBCU’s cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, and Bravo. Cable, with its dual revenue stream, is the far superior business model and where the big money is today.

Zucker’s decisiveness matters too. Immelt explained to me that he evaluates all his executives on five “growth traits”: inclusiveness, imagination/courage, expertise, external focus, and clear thinking/decisiveness. He rates his execs green, yellow, or red on each trait. Zucker’s “green”–the top–rating? Decisiveness. “He’s cocky. I kind of like that,” Immelt told me, noting that Zucker is “not afraid to make tough calls.”

Zucker’s weakness, in Immelt’s view? “He still has to work on external focus,” he said. Zucker has worked on expanding his vision. Now, with a new guy, Comcast’s Roberts, overseeing NBCU, he’ll have to work on it even more.

Before Mary Richards and Murphy Brown, there was Ann Marie–That Girl. I grew up in the ’60s. So Marlo Thomas, who played the first independent working woman I ever saw on TV, had a major impact on me. Nearly a half-century later (yikes!), I now know Marlo personally. It’s enormously gratifying to see an icon of my youth not only going strong (and looking young) but doing work that really matters.

Marlo has helped build St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, founded in Memphis in 1962 by her father, into one of the world’s outstanding children’s hospitals. She’s been instrumental in raising $700 million a year for St. Jude. With a clever idea, the annual “Thanks and Giving” campaign, has come Marlo’s tireless rallying of CEOs of big companies–including Target (TGT), CVS (CVS), Saks (SKS), FedEx (FDX), and AOL (TWX)–to support St. Jude’s and kids in need. This month is primetime for “Thanks and Giving.” We’re honored to have Marlo explain in this Guest Post where she gets her passion. –Patricia Sellers

My father, Danny Thomas, who founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital 47 years ago, told my siblings and me a lot of things when we were growing up. One of my favorites is this: “There are two kinds of people in the world: the givers and the takers. The takers sometimes eat better, but the givers always sleep better.”

I never expected to have the passion to be crisscrossing the country speaking out on behalf of St. Jude. In fact, my father told my sister, Terre, and my brother, Tony, that the work of the hospital would not be our burden to carry after he was gone.

But how could we not carry on? We’d been living with St. Jude all our lives.

When we were kids, no one was allowed to take phone calls during dinner. But my father was allowed to break that rule if a call came in from St. Jude.

I’ll never forget when he came back to the table, he’d sometimes have tears in his eyes because a little boy named David “didn’t make it.” Or he’d be beaming because a little girl named Amy was “going home at last.”

My sister and brother and I would wonder: Who are these children? And why are they so important to our Daddy?

It wasn’t until soon after my father died in 1991 that I began to understand what drove his passion for these kids and their families.

One time, I was in the medicine room at St. Jude, in the middle of an ordinary day. People were bustling about, and suddenly a little six-year-old boy leapt up onto his chair, ecstatic.

“Mommy!” he screamed out, “I don’t have cancer anymore!”

There was a moment of silence. And then every one of us in that room–doctors, nurses, other patients and their families–all of us just started to cry.

When you look into the faces of these children, you see the face of humanity. You see courage and compassion and incredible strength.

You see a capacity for joy in the face of adversity that is simply astounding. You see the potential that is in all of us.

So, even though my dad relieved me of the burden to continue his work for the hospital, I can’t resist. And it’s hardly a burden.

In 2004, Terre, Tony and I decided to launch the “Thanks and Giving” campaign, in which holiday shoppers everywhere can “give thanks for the healthy children in their life, and give to those who are not.”

“Thanks and Giving” is now an annual campaign. Its goal is to raise not just funds for children stricken with catastrophic diseases, but also awareness. We want parents everywhere to know that St. Jude remains a beacon of hope for families in their darkest hour.

Everywhere you look this month, whether you’re at your local mall or watching movie trailers in your neighborhood multiplex, you’ll see the beautiful kids of St. Jude, along with me and some of our very famous friends, like Jennifer Aniston, Robin Williams, Antonio Banderas and NFL great Reggie Bush.

Our retail partners–and we have 50 of them!–will ask you if you would like to donate a dollar or more to your purchase for the kids of St. Jude. I’ve been incredibly touched by the millions of people who have said yes. I’m hoping you’ll say yes too.

Marlo Thomas is the National Outreach Director for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. An award-winning actress, author and activist, she’s been honored with four Emmy Awards, the Peabody, a Golden Globe, a Grammy and has been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame. She is currently starring in George is Dead, a comedy written and directed by Elaine May, in Tucson and Phoenix at the Arizona Theatre Company.

by Patricia Sellers

Have we really hit bottom? Sandra Horbach, who heads the consumer and retail group at private equity giant Carlyle Group, says we have.

Horbach and I chatted on stage this morning at the Women’s Alternative Investment Summit down on Wall Street. “Trailblazers Discuss the State of the Market,” the organizers called our session, suggesting that we both have survived cycles and seen a lot. Yes, we have. Horbach, who started her career at Morgan Stanley (MS), spent 18 years at Forstmann Little before moving to Carlyle in 2005. (Meantime, I’ve been at Fortune for 25 years.)

At Carlyle, where she oversees a portfolio that includes Dunkin’ Donuts, Horbach operates out of an office right next to one of the all-time maestros of managing through tough times: Lou Gerstner, who turned around IBM (IBM) after stints atop RJR Nabisco (RAI) and American Express (AXP). “There are good-time CEOs and bad-time CEOs,” Gerstner has told Horbach many times–and yes, she heeds his advice.

As a senior advisor at Carlyle, Gerstner was gloomy and cautious earlier than most investors, Horbach explained. And in line with his thinking, Horbach’s consumer/retail group has bought no companies–zero–in the past couple of years. While credit was tight and asset values were tumbling, “bad-time CEOs” ruled the roost. Or at least these sorts of take-no-prisoner cost-cutters were favored to run Carlyle’s portfolio companies.

But about six months ago, Horbach says, Gerstner and a few others at the firm began urging a shift from defense to offense–to look for growth and start doing deals again. So, yes, the “good-time CEO” is back in vogue. Though, importantly, a new breed will be in demand. That is, CEOs who understand how to build the top line and do add-on acquisitions. Horbach predicts that we’re in for a “revenue-less recovery.”

Later on Postcards: more insights and outlook from Horbach. Stay tuned!

“When Ed Whitacre decides, it’s not negotiable. If he decides against you, you’re done.”

–Coca-Cola (KO) exec Wendy Clark, about General Motors’ (GM) new CEO, whom she worked for when he headed AT&T (ATT). Today, the GM board ousted CEO Fritz Henderson, who was in the post just eight months, and installed Whitacre, GM’s chairman, as the new chief executive.

No doubt, Whitacre had a key role in the power shift.

And hearing Clark talk about the man, you understand that anyone working under him is on a short leash. Clark, a rising star who is SVP of Integrated Marketing and Communications at Coke and previously headed marketing for Whitacre at AT&T, spoke about his unusual leadership style last month at a Fortune Most Powerful Women dinner event in Atlanta. “He doesn’t talk much. He listens intently. He surrounds himself with experts who know everything,” Clark said. She calls Whitacre “the greatest mentor” she’s ever had.

Her view of Whitacre at GM? “If Ed can’t fix it, no one can fix it,” she says.–Patricia Sellers

“Investment banking is funny. You do one transaction, then you do another of the same type and then a third. Maybe then you’ve got a business. Do ten, and it is a business.”

- Fred Joseph, former CEO of Drexel Burnham Lambert, who died of multiple myeloma, at 72 on Friday. Given the junk-bond boss’s status in the Business Hall of Shame, you might think Joseph would earn a harshly critical obit. Not so, as the New York Times illustrates today.

Joseph passes on as more of a builder than a destroyer of wealth maybe because we’ve seen, since Drexel’s implosion 20 years ago, more despicable scandal–Enron, Madoff, etc.–and more catastrophic collapse, Lehman Brothers (BCS) above all. The son of a Boston cab driver who earned two degrees from Harvard, Joseph told Fortune in 1988 that he was guilty of just one thing, “surprising naiveté,” amidst Drexel’s insider-trading scandal. He testified against Michael Milken, his partner, who went to prison and became a symbol of greed.

Milken, more visibly than Joseph, had a post-scandal resurrection–funneling his billions into philanthropy, cancer research, and global problem-solving via the Milken Institute, which still draws old Drexel execs to its powwows. These guys (yes, they were guys at the top of Drexel) had faults beyond “naivete,” obviously, but it shouldn’t detract from the fact that Joseph, as well as Milken, were ingenious in eyeing untapped markets and transforming corporate finance. “Our early niches were restructuring troubled REITs and working on equity offerings for companies that were small or troubled,” Joseph told Fortune in the 1988 first-person account of his rise and fall. “That later developed into high-yield bond offerings that we found filled a very important financing need. In those days, there was no long-term fixed-rate capital for most unrated corporations except private placements with insurance companies.”

Soon Drexel was doing junk bond deals for the cable-TV industry, then the airlines. “Sometimes we did it with new products,” Joseph said, noting that Drexel created initial-offering high-yield bonds and then high-premium convertible bonds. “We did two dozen of those deals before anybody else really got into them,” he added. “Timing and communication were always key.”

by Patricia Sellers

Gerry Laybourne likes to stake out new ground.

As a cable-TV pioneer in the ’80s, she built Nickelodeon for Viacom (VIAB).

Later, she founded Oxygen Media to fill a female void in media.

In the past two years since she sold Oxygen to NBC Universal (GE) for nearly $1 billion, Laybourne has been advising a few small businesses and serving on boards–Symantec (SYMC), Electronic Arts (ERTS), and, pending her nomination,  J.C. Penney (JCP). Meantime, she says, she’s “thinking about another start-up.”

Laybourne is always on the move. Which is why it wasn’t so surprising last week when she told us she was pioneering again–this time, very far away, in Uganda. Laybourne was walking in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for a cause.

She was participating in a Mentoring Walk, an African offshoot of an event she created in the U.S. Back when she was CEO of Oxygen, Laybourne began gathering a few hundred women–high-placed friends like Meryl Streep, Diane von Furstenberg,  J.P. Morgan Chase’s (JPM) Heidi Miller–in Central Park and pairing them with young aspiring women for advice-fueled walk-and-talks. Laybourne eventually did a dozen such sunrise walks in cities across the country. Now, as Oxygen’s owner, NBCU continues the tradition in the U.S.

On November 21, there was not just the Mentoring Walk in Uganda. Mentoring Walks took place in seven other countries across Africa and Latin America–all inspired by Laybourne.

Fortune too plays a role in the international expansion of the idea. The organizers of Mentoring Walks in five countries on November 21 are alums of the Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring Partnership. Each year, this program pairs participants of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit with rising-star leaders from across the developing world. These international mentees close out their month-long U.S. stay in Manhattan, and when they’re here, Laybourne invites them to her Upper West Side apartment to chat.

Hearing about the U. S. Mentoring Walks from Laybourne, several mentees ran with the idea–or rather, walked with it across the globe.

“Coming back home, mentoring other women has become my mission,” says Rehmah Kasule, a mentee of Axa Equitable Life Insurance Co. (AXA) EVP Barbara Goodstein in the 2009 Fortune-State Department program. Kasule runs Century Marketing, her own firm, in Kampala. On November 21, she drew 350 women and girls came to her Mentoring Walk there.

The real value of the Fortune-State Department program is when mentees pay it forward, so to speak, back in their home countries. That same Saturday, Lucy Kanu, a 2008 mentee of Exxon-Mobil (XOM), staged her second annual Mentoring Walk in Nigeria. Other Fortune alums put on Mentoring Walks in Argentina, Bolivia, and Egypt. Vital Voices Global Partnership, a non-profit group, helped organize the events. Vital Voices also supports the Fortune-State Department program.

If Laybourne could have cloned herself, she would have made it to all eight Mentoring Walks across the world. Turns out, she made it home from Uganda in time for Thanksgiving. She decided to give thanks this year, she says, “for a world of smart, energetic, game-changing women.”

P.S. Read Laybourne’s own blog post about walking and mentoring in Uganda.

I’ve been reading Credit Suisse (CS) analyst Gary Balter’s reports on hardline retailers since the mid-’90s, when I wrote about companies like Home Depot (HD) and Sears (SHLD). Balter is not only a savvy analyst. He’s also a very good writer. This morning at 7:17, Balter emailed this note to clients about Black Friday shopping, which he titled “Bring Back the Good Old Days.”  I’m on his email list, so I read it and enjoyed it so much that I asked him if we could reprint it on Postcards. “Absolutely,” Balter replied. So here’s a veteran Wall Street analyst on how Black Friday 2010 is upending our holiday shopping rituals.–Patricia Sellers

Guest Post by Gary Balter, managing director and senior analyst, Credit Suisse

What is happening to America? For years, we looked forward to getting together with the in-laws on Thanksgiving, watching some football, eating some turkey, and most important, pouring through every Black Friday ad and dividing up which stores we would each wait in line for. Waking up at 3 a.m., we would not only rush to get in line but would be in communication with the team–figuring out if Circuit City had fewer people in line, by 4 a.m. knowing if we would get one of the better door-busters at Best Buy (BBY), what the lines were like at Wal-Mart (WMT), etc.

Things began to change well before the Internet. About six years ago, CompUSA (SYX) decided to begin its Black Friday sales at midnight. That meant getting in line on the way back from turkey dinner, and then getting but a few hours of sleep before beginning the hunt in the a.m.  Of course, since it seemed that every CompUSA purchase required one to fill out a rebate form, that effort used up any time otherwise reserved for sleep.

Returning home from all stores by 8 a.m. at the latest, we would call the family and discuss splitting up the prizes, meeting somewhere between New York and Allentown, Pa., to celebrate together. Total savings on anything we really needed was likely nothing, but the thrill of the hunt kept us going. Friends of our cousins, when meeting us, would know exactly which product we had waited for and how much money we had “saved.”

A few years ago, sites like bfads.net started to compare all of the Black Friday ads. Although it made it easier, it seemed to take the thrill out of comparing the products. However, even with that, we still had the cold weather to look forward to the next morning.

About four years ago, our world changed. We discovered that in some stores, including Circuit City, one could go online on Thanksgiving and buy the Black Friday ads. The following year, others followed, but the better stores still kept their best sales for those who would wait in line.

This year, we are getting Black Friday sales for weeks before Black Friday at Sears, Kmart, Wal-Mart and Best Buy, among others, and have the ability to buy just about every ad on-line, with many stores opening on Thanksgiving. Looking at what looked like prizes worth standing in line for, at Staples (SPLS), for example, we were dismayed to read that we could buy the same products on-line from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. That is going to hurt sales of winter clothing, as we won’t have to stand in below-zero temperatures for that sliver of a savings.

May we suggest that someone in the government, at least in the colder northern states, pass a law that does not allow one to call savings ‘Black Friday’ until Black Friday? Until then, enjoy the warmth, and Happy Thanksgiving.