Laren Salgado
On the night of Thanksgiving, there’s an event that is participated in throughout the United States. It’s called Black Friday, where shopping items are sold for discounted prices. It’s an exciting event, but it also has its cons. Where so many things are up for grabs in a short period of time before it’s all gone, it causes people to get physical, and with such a large amount of people it’s a huge challenge to control people to try to make injuries to a minimum. I interviewed two people who both had to control the situation on Black Friday, and both have their comments about it. Black Friday is a fun time for us as customers, but it’s not a fun time for those who work in retail. For example, after talking with Jose S., he mentioned that “Most stores don’t hire a security team for Black Friday. It’s mostly just the regular employees.” In another scenario stores that are within a mall have the reinforcements of mall cops or MSS mall security staff. However, for independent stores it is not common to hire security service. It becomes a problem because without security you depend on you average co-worker to handle all types of people, those who are calm and those who are violent. Jessica V., who worked at organizing the sales in the mall at Herbergers, said that “There’s a custom for Black Friday events to have a group of items that are more trending to try to catch the attention of the customer but make it so they can spread throughout the store.” One thing that stores, especially Walmart, are known for doing is having the items wrapped with a time written on it, letting the consumer know when its going to be unwrapped for the people to grab. This makes it so large groups gather around the item. This is common for stores that are 24/7, so most supermarkets have this custom. But smaller stores such as in a mall have a main door locked so when the event starts the main door will open which allows everyone to go in. With these large amounts of people going after something all at once, it can lead to injury, especially trampling with children, elderly, and disabled. In 2006, there were ten people injured in a southern California mall stampede. Other injuries are common as well when law enforcements try to control a situation, especially with pepper spray. In 2011, a pepper spray attack in Walmart injured 20 people. Whether the individual was a officer was not confirmed, but in the same year in North Carolina an off-duty officer pepper sprayed shoppers, leaving 20 injured. There are so many injuries resulting from Black Friday as well as deaths that result from violence with guns that there’s actually a Black Friday death count which stands at 12 deaths and 117 injuries from 2006 to 2018. Some stores are putting in practice different methods of selling their goods during black Friday, one being having the goods wrapped rather than being first come first serve. They instead have it so each product can be presented at multiple times so instead of having one large crowd trying to get the item all at once, smaller and more frequent groups can grab the item, all at different scheduled times. To sum it all up, the event of Black Friday is when items are discounted for the holidays for one night, which has the outcome of people becoming competitive with those items to get them before they run out. This usually leads people being pushed or trampled, which then leads to injury. For these reasons, Black Friday has become less popular and the option of Cyber Monday, an event in which items are discounted on online stores. This gives the people an option to either participate in Black Friday or Cyber Monday so people who do not want to compete in Black Friday can shop online instead. Or for those who do not mind the risk of Black Friday have the option to participate in that as well.
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