Black Friday marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Being the day after Thanksgiving, it is usually one of the busiest shopping days of the year, with stores opening in the wee hours of the morning to sell stuff that you already saw for 10 months straight. People line up for blocks waiting for the doors to open to attempt to be the first one to buy that new HD TV on “sale.” Here are 7 things that are guaranteed to happen during the madness that is Black Friday.
1.) Stampedes and Long Lines
Yes, stampedes. People will gather together in a giant herd just grazing in the parking lot, but when the store opens its doors, they will become a giant crazed stampede of bargain shoppers. The stampedes are becoming so dangerous that a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in 2008 when he opened up the doors. It’s eerily similar to the scene in The Lion King when Mufasa dies saving Simba.
This scene did not make the final film
2.) Injuries
With all that stampeding going on, there will be injuries. After the initial rush, though, is where the real damage happens. Shoppers are battling each other to grab that last pair of jeans, tripping each other to get to the Home & Garden department first, or shooting each other over toys.
Does anyone see a size 8?
3.) Really long checkout lines
What happens when all those people who rushed into the store are ready to buy and checkout? You’ll have to wait in another line to buy whatever it is you waited since 4 a.m. outside the store to get in the first place. Sometimes checkout lines can be an hour long. Some people wait in that long of a line just for one item. One item. If they only realized they could come back tomorrow or next week or go online and get the item and wait less than 10 minutes in a checkout line.
This better be the best damn pair of pants I've ever worn..
4.) Coffee
You may be asking yourself how do these people do it? How do they have the energy to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning to stake out in front of a store and battle people to the death for a Tickle-Me-Elmo? Coffee, that’s how! Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, McDonald’s and other places serving coffee get big business from Black Friday shoppers. Sometimes the lines at these places are just as long as the ones in the stores. If only someone would setup a Port-A-Potty outside the stores and charge a nickel for someone to use it…
NEED COFFEE!
5.) Identity Theft
Millions of credit cards will be swiped on Black Friday. How do you know that the temp cashier hired for the holiday season isn’t a con artist or a identity thief? What’s that? Background checks you say? If he is an identity thief, he can just use another identity and clear the background check. Let’s not forget all the credit cards that will fall out of wallets and purses or be dropped on the ground, never to be used appropriately again.
6.) Empty Shelves
After the Black Friday rush, walk into a store. Look at their shelves. What do you see? Some of these stores look like barren wastelands like supermarkets do before a disaster. Some of the more popular stores may have more inventory to help repopulate the shelves, but it will take a few hours until the store looks like it did before the Black Friday shopper apocalypse.
7.) Hot electronic items will be gone within 30 minutes
The newest electronic toys will be gone within 30 minutes of the store opening. Why? Because people want new and hip technology and a way to say they are better everyone else who waited in line. Isn’t that what the holiday spirit is all about in the end?
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