I’m just off an 8-hour flight and I am incapable of bullshit right now. What the fuck. Every year, stores advertise deals designed to encourage irresponsible behavior, people behave predictably horribly, and then there’s a whole round of OH MY GOD THIS IS WHY AMERICA SUCKS and all this other crap. I’m just so done. Shop, don’t shop, but don’t let’s act like this is some kind of horrific surprise and nobody could have predicted, etc.
And once and for fucking all can we please stop acting like this is not preventable? Like everybody just has to act like this and there’s no way for anybody to think their way out of it? It’s past time for some major lawsuits that result in the kind of judgments that change corporate behavior, and in the absence of those, it’s past time for muncipalities to start getting involved, and I don’t give a fuck about socialism and the free market.
Let the lawyers fight it out in court, but let’s at least have the fight about capacity and public safety and threats to the general welfare and whatever legal precedents we have to have. Concert venues have goddamn limits and security requirements and local ordinances they’re forced to abide by to prevent crowds and crushing and stampedes and shit. Store parking lots, where employees pass out hot chocolate and the first 100 people through the door get a free whatever, should be no different. If security is inadequate then require they hire more security. If they can’t manage the crowds then manage the crowds for them, and if people get hurt, people die, shut them the fuck down.
I know this is just me being an unreasonable hippie but I am telling you, I am about done with a bunch of grown-ass adults sitting around every year scratching their heads all WELL I DON’T KNOW BOB HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED HERF DERF when there are a thousand solutions and no will to try any of them.
A.
but! everyone needs more STUFF. there’s not enough THINGS!
Freedom is untidy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.
Didn’t someone famously say that “No one could have predicted” that rabid consumers would drive SUVs into shopping mall parking lots?
Something like that. Better to fight them there, so we don’t have to fight them here, anyhow.
I often wonder if it is more media attention or if people really were getting worse on Black Friday (after all, crowds injuring each other by stampeding into a store, running over the employees, etc. makes a story that grabs the attention of readers and viewers).
But I think you’re right that egregious crowd behavior could lead to lawsuits to get the corporate attention.
Only problem is that the stores can forget that they whipped the crowd into a frenzy (after all, it would probably be legally difficult to successfully prosecute for incitement to riot). Instead, they can bashfully smile and say it is the customers’ actions and responsibility.
FUCK YEAH.
I’d also like to give a big middle finger to every news editor, producer & publisher who consider this malarkey news for a “slow news holiday”. It’s lazy and it’s cheap, is what it is.
since i am a used stuff kind of person, holidays suck. i don’t have black day shoppers in the family, i did see re frenzy at t-day. my uncle is married to the shopper set. watching his in laws was a bit like a sociology project. except for the males watching football.