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Adequate
Location: In my angry-dome.
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That'd be hell. ng, I'm trying to decide which shift would be better: The early battles or the cleanup. I still vote sleep.
"Black & Blue Friday"
Quote:
Attention, Holiday Shoppers: We Have Fisticuffs in Aisle 2
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: November 25, 2006
Perhaps it should be renamed Black-and-Blue Friday.
For decades, the day after Thanksgiving has been called simply Black Friday, because it is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, when retailers supposedly move into the black, or start turning a profit.
But bargain hunters competing for scarce quantities of “doorbuster” discounts have given this day an increasingly sharp-elbowed, close-fisted and purse-swinging edge.
Shortly after midnight yesterday, an estimated 15,000 shoppers pushed and shoved their way into the Fashion Place mall in Murray, Utah. Police soon joined them, responding to reports of nine skirmishes.
Once inside, shoppers ransacked stores, overturning piles of clothes as they looked for bargains. A retailer’s dream — too many customers! — quickly turned into a nightmare, forcing store clerks to shut their doors, and only let people in after others left. The mall even briefly closed its outside doors to avoid a fire hazard.
“It’s like a mosh pit,” said Lexie Dewegel, 19. “You get pushed everywhere.”
At the Finish Line shoe store, one employee enlisted his mother, who happened to be shopping in the mall, to guard the entrance.
“We were not prepared for this,” said Amber Friedrichsen, the store’s manager.
Customers behaved badly across the country yesterday, but the mayhem can be traced in part to an escalating battle among retailers to be the first to open their doors and offer the steepest must-have deals.
Many merchants angered shoppers by trumpeting huge discounts — like $70 portable DVD players and $600 flat-screen televisions — only to announce they were sold out moments after they opened.
The fact that so many people were sleep-deprived probably didn’t help.
It was the earliest Black Friday on record. Trying to one-up its rivals, CompUSA started its annual Black Friday sales at 9 p.m. on Thursday, just as many Americans sat down for Thanksgiving dessert.
A dozen malls, from Utah to Maine, opened at midnight. And Wal-Mart, Best Buy and J. C. Penney began ringing up sales at 5 a.m. (A 6 a.m. opening at Target seemed so 2005.)
A final tally from yesterday’s sales will not be available until tomorrow, at the earliest. But retail executives, who were constantly checking sales figures on their BlackBerrys yesterday, said the numbers suggested that the holiday season was off to a strong, if uncivil, start.
“I have not seen a crowd this size in years,” said Terry J. Lundgren, the chief executive of Federated Department Stores, after surveying the lines outside Macy’s Herald Square at 5:30 a.m.
Gerald L. Storch, the chief executive of Toys “R” Us, said reports from store managers around the country were the same: long lines at the checkout counter. “Sales results look really good,” he said.
Merchants had been wringing their hands throughout the fall over higher gas prices and a weak housing market, worrying that they would make consumers wallet-shy in the crucial November-December period.
But with prices at the pump falling, the industry is now predicting an above-average holiday season.
The National Retail Federation, a trade group, has forecast a 5 percent sales increase, to $457.4 billion, over last year. That figure is well above the industry’s performance from 2000 to 2002, when retail sales growth topped out at 3.4 percent. But it falls short of the last two seasons, when they rang up gains of more than 6 percent.
To lure customers, merchants dangled all sorts of discounts. Macy’s, Sears, J. C. Penney and Kohl’s all placed the same bet: that a $10 coupon on the front of their circulars would draw crowds. Gap offered 30 percent off everything if customers spent more than $50, and Kmart reduced the price of some apparel by 50 percent.
But once they were in the store, many customers heard a deflating message.
“Sold out, sold out, sold out,” announced the manager at a Staples on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday at 7 a.m. “When?” asked the incredulous customer. “An hour ago,” replied the manager — in other words, the minute the store opened.
In Lewis Center, Ohio, near Columbus, Cindy Milsap, 43, and her daughter, Ashley, 20, woke up before dawn to drive to the nearby Wal-Mart Supercenter, which advertised a 52-inch high-definition television for $474. “We don’t really need a new TV, Ms. Milsap said. “But at that price? C’mon.”
But the bargain eluded them. The “limited quantity” in the ad, she said, was three TVs — all sold by the time the pair arrived.
Those customers left in peace.
But at the Wal-Mart outside Columbus, customers dashing toward 5 a.m. deals pinned employees against stacks of merchandise.
“Oh, my god, stop pushing me, oh, my god,” screamed Linda Tuttle, a 47-year-old employee at the store.
Grace Smith, a 22-year-old customer in the store, was stunned by the scene. “I heard it would be crazy but I never thought I’d see anything like this,” she said.
Black Friday was once the province of a few hard-core bargain hunters, who camped outside stores waiting for deals. Stores barely advertised the event. ...end of page 1...
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I'd think insurers would be looking carefully when renewing policies for these retailer. One lawsuit could quickly turn the black into red.
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There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195
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