Rioting, stampedes and pepper-spray: when sales shopping gets violent!

November 28th, 2012

Appliance Talk Humour

What is it about the word “sale” that brings out the most violent urges in people?

We ponder this with reports from America that things got messy at this year’s Black Friday Sale …

… by no means the first time this annual retail orgasm has tapped into the kind of hysteria normally associated with doomsday sci-fi movies or, uh, last drinks at the Cricketers Arms.

It’s a salient reminder, just a few weeks before Boxing Day, about the animalistic bloodlust that seems to accompany any sales event.

Get between a sales shopper and a discounted item and you might as well smear yourself in bacon grease then try and separate a mother bear and her cub using a pointy stick.

In either case, say goodbye to some of your extremities.

Crazy bargains

For the uninitiated, the Black Friday Sale is an annual sales event – and primarily a North American phenomenon. It’s timed for the day following Thanksgiving (November 23rd, this year) – and seen as the kick-off to the Christmas shopping season. So basically the point where someone seems to press the red-button marked “EVERYONE GO FREAKIN’ NUTS”.

This year, crowds have been filmed going berko over the bargains – including this footage from the town of Moultrie in Georgia, where there was a bit of a melee over a batch of discounted mobile phones at the local Wal-Mart.

Look, at Appliances Online, we love passion. We’re just not sure how well it applies to an angry mob.

In fact, it’s another incident in a long list of spectacularly crazed behaviour associated with this sales event.

Amongst the most out-there examples:

• In 2008, eager shoppers in New York managed to trample a 34-year old Walmart employee to death.

You know someone’s a really keen bargain shopper when they’re prepared to kill. The victim was crushed by a frenzied mob of some 2000 people who surged into the store at opening time.  Apparently the stampede continued even as the victim’s colleagues tried to help the injured man.  Three cheers, we say, for humanity.

• 2010 saw a Madison, Wisconsin woman arrested outside a Toys R’ Us store. She had jumped a queue and threatened to shoot fellow shoppers who had the temerity to object to this. Bit of an overreaction methinks. I mean, they may be great – but no one needs a My Little Pony or Hungry, Hungry, Hippos that badly. I mean, we’re not talking about coffee are we?

• In 2011, a woman at a Porter Ranch, California Walmart started pepper-spraying other shoppers. This resulted in a certain amount of consternation and uproar – and a few injuries to her fellow shoppers. From what we can tell, she really, really wanted one of the new (at the time) Xbox 360s which necessarily required her to “get the advantage” over other customers who had gathered in a queue for them. And what better way to do this than with a chemical agent that causes temporary blindness?

And that’s just the tip of an unusually aggressive iceberg.

However, here’s a note of caution about these details inspiring any kind of smugly superior “only in America” kinda mentality …

Boxing Day Sales Bash

… the surging, grasping crowds witnessed at any major Australian shopping precinct clearly show that discounted prices makes us pretty bonkers as well. We expect that, come Boxing Day, Pitt Street Mall will resemble Thursday late night shopping on the eve of the apocalypse.

But, wait, there’s more …

Rabid behaviour was also witnessed earlier this year at a cosmetics sale in Collingwood. Apparently, the collective zeal for cut-price lipstick was such that six police cars were required to quell a crowd made up of over 300 sociopathic women.

One shopper, Jenny Latrou, was quoted as saying it was lucky no one was seriously hurt – “I’ve never seen anything like this, people were getting aggressive… The entrance was inundated with so many people all swarming in that they barricaded the outer door shut, so people couldn’t get in or out, which must have been pretty alarming.”

About the only positive thing to come out of the whole incident was that the Herald Sun could run with the ace headline “Beauty sale turns ugly”. Nice work, sub-editor.

What’s going on?

Admit it, some of this behaviour could be reasonably described as “over the top”. Enough is enough. We at Appliances Online are calling for an end to bargain-related violence. Make sales, not war, people.

Still, we advise caution when approaching a sales event. Don’t go overboard. Be alert not alarmed. Full body armour and a can of mace should be sufficient.

Either that (and this is by far the simplest solution), you could simply beat the queues – thereby beating the risk of physical injury – and purchase your goods at Appliances Online!