[raulduke]

A few years ago some friends and I decided to go "people watching" on black friday. There was a target shopping center near my house at the time and they had been advertising $50 DvD players (a decent deal at the time) for awhile. It didn't sound like such a big deal to me, but a friend somehow knew it would be crazy and really wanted us to go check it out w/ him, he said it would be a good sociological experience for us.

So we hung out all thanksgiving night and at about 6 a.m. we went up to this hill that was a perfect lookout over the parking lot and storefront. There were like a few hundred people outside in a pretty informal line. They were all just milling about and some even had camp chairs set up. It was all fairly calm looking, and we were all giving the guy who got us to go a hard time, it was pretty boring for the first 50 min. and then apparently an employee must have come to the door, gotten cold feet about actually opening it, and then retreated. Everyone must have seen him, and immediately the crowd frenzied. There was a bottleneck at the doors about 1/5 the size of the crowd, so there was pressure on those up front from all angles. We had binoculars and saw alot of very aggressive and some borderline violent behavior prior to the doors opening. When the doors were finally opened, it was an awful thing to watch. We went to watch because we thought it would be something like that, but it was so much worse than I had imagined. I remeber hoping that there were no children in the crowd.
We left and went to breakfast feeling pretty bad, and even worse when on the drive home when we heard that several people were injured in the vitual melee.

It's a good point that Kassandra makes, this kind of thing is completely foreseeable. It does literally happen every year.
It makes no sense to not have some sort of line system in place the night before a big sale like that. It wouldn't be hard for a huge walmart or target type chain to have their entire security staff on for one night to help w/ some sort of first come first serve line sytem.

Although it's the consumers themselves that baffle me the most, to see people lose their sh*t over a fairly cheap dvd player or plasma screen, it's very forbodeing behavior. I really hope to avoid that kind of crowd if things ever do go sideways.

They call it "black friday" because it's the day that all the stores are supposed to get out of the red and back in the black, but the phrase is beginning to seem alot darker every year.