Black Friday, known as the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States, is the day after Thanksgiving, where stores all across America slash prices, offer massive sales for shoppers to start their early Christmas shopping.
Throughout the years we have seen everything from people skipping Thanksgiving dinner to spend nights outside of stores doorways until they open so they can get inside first to grab items on sale, to outright fistfights over the last of a product that is on sale.
I referred to many of these shoppers as shopping "zombies" for a reason, one that is almost impossible to explain but which we can offer a convincing visual making the point clearly.
In the video below, at the 2:41 minute mark, you see two employees at a store, standing at the doors, preparing to open them. Outside those glass doors is a sea of people just pushing against the doors, waiting for them to open. Once opened these people literally fall into the store in a mad rush that truly is reminiscent of watching scenes from the TV show The Walking Dead, with one person actually falling down, then crawling away as to not be trampled on.
Others fall as well as more people simply step over them, or on them, to get passed them and into the store.
Unfortunately, despite the yearly nightmare stories from Black Friday as well as the video evidence of the craziness which ensues, this has spread beyond America to places like Brazil, where customers nearly came to blows just to get their grubby paws on the latest Samsung TV.
Other countries such as France, or Russia, and South Africa do not celebrate Thanksgiving but have started adopting the Black Friday madness, which has some activists and politicians up in arms. Some french lawmakers want to ban Black Friday altogether.
Considering that there have been a number of publicized injuries over the years, from people being pushed and shoved down, to injuries from fighting over products, as well as a Walmart employee quite literally trampled to death in 2008 by these "zombie"shoppers," it just doesn't seem the type of event that other nations should want to emulate.
The good news is with newer traditions such as Cyber Monday and Prime Day, as well as some retailers starting their holiday sales in October rather than waiting for Black Friday, over the past two years traffic on Black Friday has dipped a little bit lower, while still remaining one of the busiest days of the year for retailers.
This year, only 36% of people said they planned to do most of their holiday shopping on Black Friday — down from 51% just three years ago, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Other reports confirm the decrease in Black Friday retail sales as more and more people are buying online for Black Friday, which does lessen the chance of major injury or even death by the "zombie" shoppers.
Fewer people lined up outside stores as Black Friday shopping kicked off, suggesting early discounts offered by retail chains and a surge in online buying may have taken the shine off America’s biggest shopping day.
More:
While store traffic still remains an important indicator, a lot of shopping during Thanksgiving and Black Friday now happens online. Adobe Analytics, which measures transactions from 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers, estimates $7.5 billion in sales for Black Friday online, a growth of over 20.5% year-over-year.
Online sales on Thanksgiving Day alone jumped 17% to $4.1 billion in the United States, according to data from Salesforce. Global online revenue rose 24% to $20 billion.
Companies including Walmart, Target, Costco and Best Buy have bulked up their online presence, deliveries and fast in-store pickups to attract customers.
While Black Friday still matters, its relevance is fading as the holiday shopping season now begins the week before Halloween and stretches to Christmas Eve with retailers offering deep discounts throughout the season.
A very good question, as readers watch the last compilation videos at the end of this article, showing utter chaos and craziness of Black Friday, keep that question in mind.
With food shortages and price hikes expected after the mid-west flooding, then the early frost, while many ranchers lost livestock, and other issues out of country with meats and pigs, one really has to wonder how dangerous the people seen in the video above and the ones below, are going to be when it isn't just a Christmas gift they are fighting over but could very well be their families only meal for the day or week?
It is hard to imagine the shopping "zombies" seen in those videos having the foresight to have prepared for the possibility of food shortages with emergency survival foods, or water, or any other basic necessity which would be needed in a SHTF scenario, so there is absolutely no doubt they will fight tooth and nail over any food items left on the shelves.
BOTTOM LINE
Black Friday seems to bring out the worst in many people, where in order to get that "percentage" off as a sale, people will kick, scream, hit, and basically allow themselves to be turned into shopping "zombies" that act no better than wild, rabid animals.
Now just imagine these same people in a TEOTWAWKI situation.
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