Black Friday Mayhem® is, at heart, a Promotional Gimmick

[cthulu2016]

Today's Drudge splash:

Mall mayhem...
Suspected shoplifter shot after dragging cop through KOHL's parking lot...
Brawls...
Man stabbed over parking spot...
Shopper Kicked Out Of WALMART For Filming Fight...
Man shot walking home with big screen...
Shoppers Trampled In Race For $49 Tablet...
SALVATION ARMY kettles stolen...
REPORT: Profit margins jump for sales 'hoax'...

But that all could have been written last week for all the difference it makes. We all knew that, barring aliens landing, the lead on today's news was going to be Black Friday Mayhem.

Black Friday mayhem as a pre-label for anything untoward that happens in a retail store today. In in addition to being good tabloid news (about retail stores, with which I am familiar, and providing an opportunity to think my neighbors are savages), Black Friday mayhem is a national consumerism advertisement. A good will gesture to the clients. (Media lives on advertising. Consumer goods make up the bulk of advertising. Etc..)

The story would be the same whether there were 10 incidents of a thousand incidents. It is not a story at all. It is a pre-designed meta-story... a label with which to bootstrap stories that don't belong on the news at all into a national crisis of toy-awesomeness.

Tonight my local news on the east coast will tell me how somebody in Oakland or Seattle slapped someone else's face in a Toys-R-Us or Best Buy. Why? How is that news, let alone newsworthy from 3000 miles away?

Re-watch Bill Murray's delightful (and under-rated) SCROOGED for a reminder of the technique. He advertises a Christmas special with the goal of, not making the viewer want to watch it, but making the viewer fear not watching it.

At one time, businesses would have resisted calling their sales events "Black Friday," which conjures stock market crashes, satanic rites and mass-murders... but today they embrace it.

You would think that promising gun-play and tragedy would make people avoid, rather than embrace, these consumption orgies. But it obviously does not work that way, in aggregate.

If people are willing to lay down their lives... to fight and KILL for a $49 tablet, then when you see the same one on sale where you can just buy it without grievous personal injury it would be almost unpatriotic not to!

And hype has a fascinating relationship with reality. One you convince people that Black Friday is a thing where people stab each other over toys then people will increasingly tend to stab each other over toys.

It is the thing to do. The place to be.

[Skittles]

1. people are SO easily manipulated

it really is pathetic

[Oscarmonster13]

2. yep

I said it before...it is amazing how much Mob Mentality has taken over so many people...just trying to get their trinkets so they can focus elsewhere and not on the impending poverty/enslavement of the corporations...

[MineralMan]

3. I shop the week before Christmas.

Prices are even lower then. The last minute Christmas sales are where I find my gifts.

[LeftyMom]

4. Of course it is.

If you want to avoid trampling or days long lines and you have limited numbers of sale items the easy way to get around it is to set up a lottery. Show up in the few days before the sale and get a ticket, if your ticket gets called you get a $100 flatscreen or whatever. But you don't get the free publicity that comes with having people outside your store in tents and the press showing up to film the idiots.

[maced666]

5. It is, buyer beware but let them have it.

Friday, I may participate if I see this or that item, but that is rare.
It's the 'force workers in on holiday' on Thanksgiving day that really gets my blood boiling.

All I see in my mind are these fat cats around some extravagant board table making a decision to force barely-getting-by minimum wage workers in on a holiday, away from family and friends. And I just lose it! Assholes.

[MiniMe]

6. I went shopping on the day after Thanksgiving for years with my Mom

We went up to my Grandmother's house on Thursday, and went shopping on Friday. We bought gifts for the relatives who lived up there so we didn't have to deal with mailing gifts. That was a long time ago, I'd never do it now.