When Black Friday Lives Up to Its Name

I'm now convalescing at home after undergoing hip replacement surgery on my left hip. Due to my limited mobility, I pretty much missed out on the annual "Black Friday" tradition. Hell it's not much of a loss since I've grown disgusted with the way people have behaved on Black Friday for years in their narrow-minded singular quest to buy Christmas presents on the cheap regardless of whether the intended recipients would've wanted the items or not.

Well, these two stories have brought a new low for Black Friday.

The first is about a Wal-Mart worker who died under the most despicable circumstances.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.

When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.
"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.
"They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.

Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

"They pushed him down and walked all over him," Damour's sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. "How could these people do that?"

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"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since Friday morning!'" Cribbs said. "They kept shopping."

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Items on sale at the Wal-Mart store included a $798 Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28 and Men's Wrangler Tough Jeans for $8.

The Long Island store reopened at 1 p.m. and was packed within minutes.

"I look at these people's faces and I keep thinking one of them could have stepped on him," said one employee. "How could you take a man's life to save $20 on a TV?

Think that story is bad enough? Well, here's another one that's equally despicable.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/11/shots-were-fire.html

Shots rang out today inside a Toys R Us store in Palm Desert, killing two and causing shoppers at the busy store to scramble for cover.

Palm Desert Councilman Bob Spiegel told The Times that based on early reports, two rival groups shopping at the store had some kind of argument and then shots were fired. Two men were killed in the exchange of gunfire, he said.

Sara Frahm, 25, of La Quinta was shopping for electronic toys at the time of the shooting. She told The Times she heard two women fighting and swearing in an aisle next to her. She said employees went to break up the fight and that all of the sudden a number of people yelled, "He has a gun!" She said she heard six or seven shots.

Mike Stitt of Yucca Valley was shopping with his wife and two children when he saw two women fighting and calling each other names. Both were with men. One of the men pulled out a gun and shot it in the air, then shot the other man in the back, Stitt told The Times.

In a statement, Toys R Us stressed that the shooting appeared to stem from a "personal dispute."

There have been so many incidents between big box retailers, holiday shoppers, and Black Friday over the years that it was sadly inevitable that people would end up dying for no real good reason. I can remember back in the 1980's when the Cabbage Patch dolls were a big deal and I heard stories about people who were literally fighting in the aisles for these damned dolls. There were similar fights that arose in big box store shopping aisles during the years when Tickle Me Elmo and Furby were pronounced in the media as "Hot Toys" and people ended up being injured.

Now we have people who have died over Black Friday. What is it about Black Friday that makes adults act like animals in their quest to purchase stuff on the cheap, most of which will eventually end up gathering dust in basements or even in landfills once the holiday season ends? I'm no advanced well-credentialed college researcher (in fact, I have a Bachelor's degree) but I've managed to observe a few things about Black Friday.

First of all, for the last 10 years or so I've noticed an increase in the number of stores who announce that they would be opened at extremely early hours. (Such as Macy's, which announced that it would opened its doors on Black Friday at 4 a.m.) In order to entice people to rise up out of bed, they would have a limited number of consumer items that would be sold at their lowest prices so that people who wake up early would pay the lowest prices. The ads also say that if you don't arrive very early, you'll miss out on bargains.

I've noticed that the large department store chains (like Kohl's and Macy's) and big box retailers (like Wal-Mart and Best Buy) are the ones who engage in this practice. I've never heard of a small locally-owned mom-and-pop store doing this. Nor have I ever heard of smaller-sized retail stores (like GameStop or Claire's) doing this. It's the big stores who entice people to end their Thanksgiving festivities early so they can go into long lines in the cold and dark just so they can save money buying presents.

I also recognize that the reason why the big stores get away with this is because many shoppers have been acting like sheep and obeying the store's orders to come very early in the morning or else. These people have been seduced into believing that they have to put on the most perfect Christmas and if they can do it while not spending a lot of money, then it's all the better.

Basically it's the tyranny of the big stores who lord it over shoppers by dictating when they will lower prices. It doesn't help that there are far fewer stores than there used to be so the big stores can get away with forcing people to go into stores early in the morning in the quest to save money. When I was growing up, there used to be stores like Hecht's, Hutzlers, Hohschild Kohn's, Woodward & Lothrop's, and Garfinckle's--all of whom were local department stores who operated in the Baltimore-Washington area. As far as I can remember, none of them ever opened their doors on Black Friday earlier than 8 a.m. nor did they encourage shoppers to wait in lines overnight so they could be the first ones in the doors when they opened,

But starting in the 1980's, many of these stores I knew have disappeared either through mergers or bankruptcies and it's gotten to the point where there aren't as much variety and diversity in retail as there used to be. As a result, stores could act dictatorial towards shoppers by opening at insane hours and try to get away with it.

As a result you have a bunch of brainwashed shoppers who are so obsessed with buying presents for the lowest prices that they are willing to endure difficulty in finding parking, spending hours waiting in long lines for the doors to open at 4, 5, 6, or 7 a.m. just so they can find something cheap. These people endure so much degradation in their quest to save money that nothing else matters--including people's lives.

I know it's too late this year but next year we the people need to take a stand against the stores' manipulating the general public like this. Is buying a cheap television set or DVD player really worth getting up very early in the morning? In fact, I even question the quality of many of these early-morning sale items. How do I know that a certain MP3 player on sale for under $50 won't break a few months after the holidays end? How do I know that a certain child's toy on sale for under $20 won't be subjected to a recall a few months later because it has too much lead in it? Is that [name of consumer item made by a company I've never heard of before] is a quality item that will give me the most bang for my buck or is it some cheaply made junk that's doomed to end up in a landfill when it breaks a week after the three-month warranty expires?

Most importantly, is pursuing a cheap consumer item more important than a person's life?