Those of you out there who inconvenienced someone in your rampaging behavior to get some object on the day after Thanksgiving ought to have to tell the person you gave it to what it cost. The folks who trampled the Walmart employee to death back in ’05 should have to tell their kids that someone died so they could have whatever it was. The guy who flung a wheelchair bound lady to the ground in the stampede should have to look the child in the eye and say “I knocked down someone your Grandma’s age to get this for you because she was in my way.”
This kind of thing isn’t happening in every single store everywhere in the country during the first hour of opening on Black Friday. The reports come in of injuries, fist fights and the like. And I read them and think, it’s not worth it. Being able to say you got the latest item for yourself or your kid is not worth anyone’s life or health. Stores should spread those sales over the weekend, not open before dawn and make sure there is enough of the hot items so that this riot-like behavior doesn’t happen. The stores could make more money, have happier customers and there would be no deaths and injuries.
Neither of these two scenarios will happen. Stores like creating urgency and scarcity to drive sales and we the consumers don’t have enough independence to see through it all. It’s sad. And I’m way too cynical to think I’ll ever be surprised by people where money is concerned.