I guess someone was standing their ground yesterday in Tallahasse Florida when a Walmart kicked off the Holiday shopping season on the sadly appropriately named Black Friday:
A shooting outside a Tallahassee Walmart marred a Black Friday that otherwise got off to a roaring start with festive shoppers, crowded stores and robust online sales.
The Tallahassee shooting left two people wounded. The injuries were not life threatening, police said.
Apparently the shooting started over a fight for a parking spot:
The Black Friday frenzy was not confined to the inside of the stores Friday, when police in Tallahassee, Fla. said two people were shot in a dispute over a parking space outside a Wal-Mart.
Yes, such a festive occasion, people buying stuff they’ve been convinced they need with credit cards that charge outrageous fees. So festive someone had to bring a gun to a shopping fight celebration.
Of course there were the other usual incidents of rugby scrums breaking out while shopping that we’ve heard of before:
Beyond Tallahassee, there were scattered reports of fights and mob scenes.
Lisa Helder of Gibbstown, N.J., described her trip to a Victoria’s Secret to get a free gift bag as a “disasterous nightmare.” When the store raised the gates, she says, “you would have thought a pack of wild animals were behind me.”
She was pushed to the floor and nearly trampled until another shopper tried to help her up, while her daughter cried and her sister screamed. Once she was up, she started getting shoved again, “by crazy women fighting over items that weren’t even on sale.”
I love that last quote don’t you? It implies that stomping and trampling people for stuff that was “on sale” wouldn’t qualify one as acting “crazy.” America, land of the the world’s stupidest, most violent consumers. Whatta country!
A frightening-looking melee broke out at a Georgia Wal-Mart when shoppers rushed cases of cellphones that offered pre-paid, unlimited usage plans.
A video of the Thursday night scene (below) posted on YouTube shows a mob of customers at the Moultrie store pushing toward a display of cellphone boxes, their words drowned out over an unintelligible chorus of shouts. At one point, a man shoves his hand over a woman’s mouth as she begins to back away from the area and the woman appears to bite his hand in response.
Another man, who managed to grab one of the coveted items, waves it in the air only to have it ripped away by another customer a couple feet away. People clawed through the display’s plastic wrapping while others reached over the people in front of them, grabbing shoulders and pulling their competition backward.
Roll the tape:
