News footage of Black Friday sales, in which shoppers line up after Thanksgiving in search of steeply reduced merchandise, can resemble an episode of the classic nature show “Wild Kingdom.”
Shoppers wind neatly along the edges of big box stores like patiently waiting army ants. As doors open, sleep-deprived bargain hunters leap past one another like spawning salmon flinging themselves upstream. At close of business we see bare, dangling store shelves, reminiscent of the gnawed carcasses left behind by a pride of lions.
To those who don’t participate, Black Friday may seem like madness, an exercise in chaos to be avoided at all costs. But for the initiated, the country’s biggest shopping day is something more: a jump start on Christmas shopping and even a ritual worth preserving.
It’s impossible not to marvel at the spectacle. CNN.com readers shared their own dramatic stories about the annual event in the comments section of a recent article.
“At about 10 p.m. Thanksgiving 2011, someone sat their Grandma at a bin in the aisle at Walmart with her hand on a DVD discounted from $19 to $5 until the clock struck midnight to make sure she got it,” reader Mark Nelson remembered.
“People started disregarding the etiquette and just stashing items in their jackets instead of leaving them in the shrink-wrapped displays. People were shoving and screaming at each other,” he wrote. “A woman was brought to the front and kicked out for bringing a firearm into the store and brandishing it at a rival shopper. It was the grandma hoping to score the $5 DVD.”
So what’s the draw of risking life and limb for discounted DVDs?
“It feels like some kind of communal shopping experience, something we’re all in together,” said Brian Ginn, a friend of mine from college who has been braving the Black Friday crowds for a decade.
He usually only makes four or five purchases on Black Friday, spending around $400. It’s worth the effort, he said, to “soak up the mad capitalist consumer energy of Black Friday!”
“It’s pretty exciting to see people shopping like crazy,” Ginn said, “even if my enthusiasm gets dampened by the long lines and occasional surly shopper.”
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article courtesy of Newsnet5.com
