If you are not reading this from a tent outside of the Best Buy, then you are wasting my time and your own. The most important part of any battle is preparation. In the words of Sun Tzu, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” But if you have already messed it up this bad, then I guess you will need the following tips even more.

All warfare is based on deception. Guess who said that. It was ya boy, Sun Tzu. It’s too late to grab the choicest tent spots outside the Best Buy, so it is time to get a job at Best Buy, or borrow a Best Buy uniform, whichever is more applicable to your given set of skills.

Infiltrate the store. To know your enemy, you must become your enemy, just like good ol’ Sun Tzu says. You may have thought that your fellow shoppers are your enemies. Untrue. They are your comrades in arms. Were it not for the Best Buy employees, you and your fellow shoppers would ravage this Best Buy like piranhas eating a cow. It is the chaos born from their greed that will win you the day.

Sun Tzu said, “In the midst of chaos, there is opportunity.” If you were smart enough to pitch a tent on the sidewalk of the local Best Buy a week earlier, surviving off of nothing but the SmashBurger next door, stealing precious few moments to relieve yourself in the SmashBurger restrooms, then you gotta get some snakes. You can bring’em from home. Poke some holes in a tupperware container, scrounge for some garden snakes in your lawn.

You’re gonna feel tempted to drop those snakes as soon as you enter the Best Buy. Don’t do that. You have to wait until the store has lost all sense of social integrity. You’re gonna need to wait until Best Buy has become the bottom inning of Lord of the Flies. Then release the snakes.

You gotta wait until the employees have been divided amongst the different theatres of cacophony that this wonderful holiday has spawned within this monument to capitalism. You throw those snakes out too soon and everybody will just postpone the festivities of this Grim Morning in the Heart of Greed. It has to already be chaotic. These snakes? They are going to push it to the brink. What was once a vicious bloodsport will become a carnival of fear, with you as the macabre ringleader. It’s just as Sun Tzu said: “You gotta get some snakes up in there.”

But there was a flaw in your plan. You were counting on the employees concerning themselves with the panicked civilians, screaming about snakes and tents and whatever else. But here’s the thing: half those employees? Double agents. They infiltrated the store while you were outside in your tent, luxuriating in some SmashBurger and watching basketball highlights on your iPhone, praise be. A few of them have been living in the vents since last Black Friday.

As you reach for the iPhone 360, an “employee” stops you, saying such lines as, “Sir, shouldn’t you be evacuating? There are, like, snakes everywhere.” Meet their gaze. Meet it hard. Grab them by the collar of their cheap little blue polo and whisper in their ear, “If you think I am unprepared to die, you would be wrong.”

Reach into your pocket and grab a handful of miniature marshmallows that you were keeping for a fun snack later. The Best Buy employee counters, throwing a dozen rusty pennies into your face, but it doesn’t phase you. You’ve been wearing squash goggles this entire time. You have looked so cool. Sun Tzu told me so. You grab the iPhone, you leave $200 on the ground; it’s the thought that matters in capitalism.

You run from the store a winner.

Now you’re left weeping on the ground, wearing a stolen Best Buy polo, surrounded by pennies and marshmallows, all because you hadn’t been living a tent for a past week.

Happy Thanksgiving.