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Lorie and Ryan Davenport are camped out in front of Best Buy in St. Petersburg, Florida, so they will be first in line for the Black Friday sale a full week from today. They switch off heir duties with another couple, and say they are saving places for ten people altogether, but this might tend to put a crimp in their Thanksgiving holiday.
“We’ve been doing this for six years now and we got beat out by the same guy for the last six years,” said Lorie Davenport. “So this year, we said, this might be our last year, it might be our last hurrah, so we’re coming extra early if we have to because we are gonna be first if it kills us.”
After getting an OK from Best Buy management, the Davenports are now in it for the long haul.
Although the couple say they’re not sure what they’ll buy when the doors open at 5 a.m. next Friday, they are hoping for a good deal on a large-screen TV or perhaps something from the Apple Mac line.
Shopping is very important to some people. Link -via J-Walk Blog
People get a little crazy when an item they want goes on sale, or becomes available during a shortage. Some have been injured, or even killed over a simple act of shopping.
Mass shopping can be like mass religion… what starts as a joyful experience can many times spiral into cold-hearted brutality showing the unfortunate soiled underbelly of mankind. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we are, at our core, irrational animals. So the next time you consider getting that “hot new item” you just got to have, make sure you don’t become one of the headlines below.
Check out the following 16 Unbelievable Shopping Disasters and make it a point to be “nicer” to your fellow man this upcoming holiday season. The life you save may well be your own!
From the Upcoming 
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Photo: Michelle Pred (planting her work into IKEA’s inventory.)
As crowds rushed to find deals at the Emeryville, CA IKEA store, one of them had a plan other than shopping. Michelle Pred was actually placing her artwork, complete with working IKEA barcodes, into the inventory, an act she calls “shopdropping.” Unlike shoplifting, she isn’t breaking any laws, and IKEA pocketed the money. It’s all a statement by the artist.
In Pred’s case, the statement is “You Are What You Buy,” which also happens to be the title of the prints she shopdropped, a commentary on excessive consumerism on a day where excessive consumerism practically is celebrated. She says that as a conceptual artist, she valued the opportunity to make a statement about society over the chance to make money. The shopdrop itself, in fact, is part of the piece.
Pred gained national attention in 2002 when she made art out of knives and nail-cutters snagged by security at local airports. In 2006 she attempted to demystify the cannabis plant by growing one in a San Francisco gallery.
The signed, limited edition prints were marked and sold for $8.00 each. The same prints can be bought in Pred’s studio for $200. Story at Link.
Artist’s website
The Christmas shopping season began when stores opened early today to draw in bargain-hunters. When did the day after Thanksgiving become such a milestone? And where did the name Black Friday come from? The answers to these questions and more are at mental_floss today. Link
Doing some Black Friday shopping? Make sure you get your caffeine, have plenty of cash and checks on hand, and program your doctor’s office on your speed dial. As the day and the deals have gotten more hyped up over the past several years, stampedes and fights have broken out in the frenzy, resulting in injuries and even death. Here are a few of those incidents.
Just last year, a “greeter” at Walmart in Valley Stream, New York, was killed when the crowd of 2,000+ people trampled over him when the doors opened on Black Friday. Jdimytai Damour was 6’4” and 270 pounds and was trying to hold back shoppers who were pressed up against the sliding glass doors. The doors shattered from the pressure, Damour was thrown to the floor, and shoppers rushed over him in a craze to get to their bargains. The official ruling was that he died of asphyxiation. Although other shoppers were injured in the stampede, Damour was the only fatality – the other four injured people were treated and released from the hospital, including a woman who was eight months pregnant. There were reports that she had miscarried, but they were false. Damour’s family has filed a lawsuit against Walmart, citing that the company “engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem and was otherwise careless, reckless and negligent.” Photo from FoxNews.com.
In 2005, it wasn’t a stampede to get to items that caused trouble at Walmart – it was a single line-cutter. People were waiting in an orderly line at an Orlando store to get a heavily discounted computer when one man jumped ahead in the line. The assembled crowd wasn’t really appreciative of this – they ended up wrestling him to the ground.
Last year was definitely a bad year for Black Friday shoppers. On the same day, but a different coast, two men were shot and killed after an argument at a Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, California. The women they were with were arguing – even coming to blows, according to the Huffington Post – and the fight escalated when the men discovered that they belonged to rival gangs. They ended up shooting only each other – no other injuries were reported. Photo from LAist.com.
Another computer was the source of a riot at the same retailer in 2005. When a laptop went on sale for $100 off the normal price, Cecelia Brannon of Jacksonville, Fla., was second in line because she wanted to get one for her daughter in college. When the doors opened, she got pushed under the rushing crowd and ended up suffering from a concussion and continuing back and neck problems. “This is America’s version of the running of the bulls,” her husband said. As of 2007, Cecelia was still walking with a cane as a result of her Black Friday injuries and still had to take a slew of prescription medications. “I saved 100 on that computer,” she said. “I’ve spent probably $100,000 on medical bills.”
P.S. – I didn’t intend to hate on Walmart, but a vast majority of the Black Friday incidents happened there! If you’re headed to score some deals tomorrow, be extra careful. What’s your opinion – should the onus be on the retailer for not providing enough security, or should people be responsible for their own actions?
How crazy are people on Black Friday? Are the deals so good that they would trample someone to death? Here’s a tragic Wal-Mart stampede that left one worker dead and got several people (including a pregnant woman) injured:
The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde. [...]
"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. "They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.
Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.
Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.
"They pushed him down and walked all over him," Damour’s sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. "How could these people do that?
If that’s not bad enough, even after being told that someone was killed, they kept on shopping!
Link (with video tape of the stampede)
(Photo: Augustine for The Daily News)
