As Black Friday comes down to a close, there'll be people who leave a store only to head to a local hospital. Black Friday, unfortunately, routinely shows the worst in people—how eager they are to get a cheap television that will be obsolete in a year's time that they're willing to trample over people and knock them to the ground to get it in their hands.
I used to work at a certain major electronics store in Calif., people lined up outside days before Black Friday was set to begin, and when the day came, yeah, we had a few things on sale: a few big screen TV's (but only 20 of them!), a few laptops (only 25 of them!), and bundled video game consoles that came with two games or so, which when all added up, only saved about less than $50. DVDs, accessories, and the like, were all sold at a barely discounted price (that's if it was even discounted at all), and people swooped them up like hotcakes. The advertised discounted items all seemed like a plan to get people into stores, and once they ran out of those items—which they were, quickly—people were of course going to end up buying the other things that weren't necessarily on sale anyway. Luckily, I think I only saw about one fight over a PS3 bundle, but the mob mentality of a lot of people was downright scary. That was years ago, though, and it seems that Black Friday has gotten even bigger, with stores opening up on Thanksgiving. #WTF.
This brings us to Black Friday Death Count, a website that keeps track of death and injuries that have happened since 2006, with Walmart helping to add to a lot of the injuries. Check it out, and hopefully you're able to read it from the comfort of your home (maybe on your brand new discounted laptop), and not from a hospital room.
Or worse. One Walmart employee has already died in New York after he was trampled on by customers. "When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since Friday morning!'" witness Kimberly Cribbs said. "They kept shopping."
"I look at these people's faces and I keep thinking one of them could have stepped on him," said an employee. "How could you take a man's life to save $20 on a TV?"
