Black Friday Brawls: When Sales Turns Violent, Prices Aren't The Only Things That Drop

The Black Friday brawls that come accompanying the sales aren't pretty. The internet is loaded with videos upon videos of fistfights and rowdy violence that break out at stores across the United States offering crazy price drops over the Thanksgiving weekend. For the sake of saving bucks, people are ready to put their decency at stake.

The discounts that this holiday, which falls on November 26 this year, brings are not minuscule by any measure. Significant shopping items like furniture, home appliances, high-end tech products and clothes, of course, become unimaginably affordable. It is no surprise then that Black Friday is widely understood to be the busiest day for shopping in the US.

But as notorious as the sales is the violence that tags along. And while, thanks to the vlog video consumption culture, visuals of these chaotic moments have become entertainment fodder, they expose a deep, intrinsic human facility for cut-throat competitiveness, notwithstanding the stiff cost that comes at - oh, the irony!

Shoppers streaming into stores at volumes nearing stampedes are ready to push and pull, throw a few punches, snatch and steal, and even threaten to kill if they have to. As per reports, the latter actually happened. A famous case from 2010 involved a 21-year-old woman from Wisconsin who allegedly cut into a line at a Toys R Us store during their Black Friday sale and allegedly threatened to kill whoever moved ahead of her, a CNN report from the time says.

Black Friday Brawls: What Are They Worth & Are They Really Worth It?

The Wisconsin one is not an isolated case. Every year, an incident or more bearing similarity to this one in lesser or higher degree emerges. These annual displays of depravity should beg us to think: Are sales really worth losing basic sense over? Should the frenzy of saving some pennies blind our conscience? Can these shopping bargains really function without regulation and tight guidelines on their operations?

This is not to dismiss the reality that Black Friday sales make amenities accessible to greater class demographics that may otherwise not be able to afford them. Here, it near about appears to become a matter of survival, of jostling your way in to the possibilities of a better life and gain better resources. The usefulness of sales cannot be rejected.

Then again, when one reads of brawls like this one from 2015 that reportedly occurred between two women over a Barbie doll, the human condition is highlighted again.

Dr Sharron Lennon, a merchandising professor at Indiana University who has studied consumer behaviour, says Black Friday skirmishes and violence possibly come about when "feelings of unfairness" are invoked in shoppers. In a 2017 interview, she told The New York Times, "The more they perceived the retailer situation to be inequitable, the more consumer misbehaviour they displayed."

The fear that stocks in stores would run out before consumers could get to them could be another reason to explain the mania.

But the world is not running out of furniture anytime soon and neither are clothes going extinct. Relax. You can lay your hands on good steals all through the year, if only you know the right places to look.

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