Philedelphia cops in the 1960s first used Black Friday to describe the hellscape of snarled traffic and Christmas-shopping stampedes the day after thanksgiving. In the 1980s the unofficial holiday was cheerfully rebranded as the day when retailers’ checkbooks slid “back in the black.” Some folks on the interwebs prefer to call it “America’s Running of the Bull”. Whatever the case, here’s how not to shop after Thanksgiving.
2011, Thousand Oaks, CA
Shrieking hordes tear into an Urban Outfitters at midnight. The Ring Wraiths from Return of the King recorded this awful sound as their ring tones and sang it to their baby wraithlets at dusk.
2006, Fresno, CA
A Best Buy PS3 sale turns into real life Grand Theft Auto. Who knew gamers were such bullies?
2011, Los Angeles, CA
A woman with two children pepper sprayed fellow shoppers waiting in line for an Xbox 360. Twenty people were treated for minor injuries.
2011, Mesquite, TX
Woman almost crushed to death at (again) Walmart. The US army now lists Walmart as the single most dangerous American city once a year.
2008, Long Island, NY
In this awful incidence, someone was killed by shoppers at Walmart. Shoppers began lining up at 9pm and burst through Wal-mart’s gates at 5am, trampling a 34-year-old temp worker and injuring a pregnant woman. The temp worker was pronounced dead after police retrieved him from the fray, fending off shoppers the whole way. The National Retail Federation considers this the first Black Friday casualty.
2011, Buckeye, AZ
Cops body-slammed a grandfather who tucked a video game under his waistband to carry his grandson above the crowd. The man laid in his own blood for 10 minutes as cops handcuffed him and charged him for shoplifting and resisting arrest. The video game was reportedly shaken, but uninjured. Gory Youtube videos showed that fellow shoppers came to the old man’s aide and confronted the police for unnecessary violence.
Here is a compilation of a million Black Friday stampedes that makes The Walking Dead seem like a long walk on a beach.
The only non-horrible way to digest this is to consider that maybe everyone wanted gifts for all of their loved ones. But for those turned off by the entire idea of lining up for hours for attractively priced electronics, consider shopping online on Cyber Monday or calling it a Buy Nothing Day.