Every year in the US, retailer offer large discounts and attractive deals on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Along with Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, when similarly large deals are offered for online shopping, Black Friday is fast becoming a global phenomenon, with retailers in other countries also joining in.
In their rush to grab the best deals, shoppers often fight with one another. There are widespread incidents of violence in malls and department stores as a result of the shopping frenzy.
A video (above) from the city of Hoover in Alabama, USA, shows just how violent shoppers can get, with the police having to intervene by physically holding them down. Paramedics had to treat a victim on the scene for minor injuries sustained in a fight. The mall had to be shut down as a result of the violence.
In the video (above and below) from Mbombela in South Africa, thousands of people can be seen lined outside a local mall, many of them who have been waiting outside since the wee hours of the morning.
The Washington Post remarked that “videos of the type of violence that takes place on Black Friday are being used to sell the shopping holiday back to us, the capitalist serpent swallowing its own tail.”
If that wasn’t enough, four adult men were involved in fighting over what appeared to be a toy car at a Walmart store. The video (below) shows them trying to get control of a cardbox box containing the toy, and the men continued to grapple until a woman convinces one of the men to let go, leaving the other three to continue the fight.
This kind of behaviour is not new for Black Friday shoppers. A video (below) from 2015, shot in Saginaw, Michigan, USA, shows an adult woman ripping a box from a young boy’s hands before pushing the boy’s mother aside and running away with her bounty.
More scenes of mayhem were captured on camera in Brazil and Greece, where huge crowds of customers can be seen scuffling in their attempts to grab cut-price televisions.
Elsewhere, though, the situation was entirely different. In the city of Manchester and even Oxford Street in London, the retailers were all set for the big day with extra staff and even some policemen on call. But they missed the key ingredient: customers.
The one odd customer who did show up (videos below) was rewarded with empty stores, much to the amusement of the mediapersons who had gathered to document the shopping craze.
Here’s a montage of the “greatest Black Friday fights”:
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