This year’s Black Friday Death Count
Black Friday Death Count’s leaderboard says that Black Friday 2014 resulted in 8 deaths and 96 injuries.
I wouldn’t have counted the murder attempt/suicide at the Nordstrom in Chicago. That’s not violence or injury as a result of marketing-generated shopping madness, but a domestic assault carried out on someone who was working at a retail store on the day.
More and more of the Black Friday incidents on their list are taking place in the U.K., where they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but have borrowed the post-Thanksgiving shopping gimmick from their cousins across the pond.
The violent history of Black Friday
Here’s Machinima’s entertaining history of Black Friday, which wasn’t always a term used the way we use it today:
The science behind why people kill each other over TVs on the Friday after Thanksgiving
The photo above shows two sets of shoppers in Wembley, an area of northwest London (and remember, I mentioned earlier that Thanksgiving isn’t a tradition in the UK), fighting over a TV. It appears along with an article in the British paper The Independent, where they say that we’re hardwired in such a way that under the right set of circumstances, we will commit acts of violence, and Black Friday lines up those circumstances all too well.
Last year’s Black Friday Haiku, just because
I’ll close with Kenzie Lind’s three greatest sequential tweets from last year, which became an accidental haiku (right down to the 5 – 7 – 5 syllable scheme) that captures Black Friday so well:
