This article has it all. Imagine you are in a Wal*Mart on Thanksgiving. It’s 9:55 pm, and the store is set to reduce prices dramatically at ten. There’s a pallet on the floor in the video game section, covered in shrink-wrap. It has new consoles for the Wii and XBox. Customers become impatient and start pushing toward the pallet. People are getting forced on top of it. Shoving and screaming ensues. Someone begins ripping and tearing at the shrink-wrap. Others push over the shelves holding video games, strewing them across the floor where they are immediately trampled. Then, a woman reaches into her purse and grabs some pepper spray, She unleashes it on the dense crowd. The Oleoresin Capsicum wafts through the store, ripping into people’s throats and irritating their skin. The faces of the closest victims swell up grotesquely. And then? Shopping resumes as normal.
The pepper spray wafted through the air, [Alejandra] Seminario said, and she breathed some in and started coughing. Her face also started itching.
“I did not want to get involved. I was too scared. I just stayed in the toy aisle,” she said.
By the time she and her husband, 27-year-old Cesar Seminario, got to the cash register 20 minutes later with a Wii gaming console and some Barbie dolls, the air was still smelling of pepper spray, she said.
Two hours later, sanity had returned.
Nakeasha Contreras, 20, of North Hollywood, said she arrived at midnight and hadn’t heard what happened. Even if she had, she said, she wouldn’t have minded: “I don’t care. I’m still getting my TV. I’ve never seen Wal-Mart so crazy, but I guess it could have been worse.”
And then there is this guy, who probably ought to be a little concerned.
Joseph Poulose, who said he was hit with the spray near the DVD and video games display, criticized the store for failing to control the crowds.
“There were way too many people in a building that size. Every aisle was full,” he said. Customers were stomping on photo frames and other items on the floor, said Poulose, who tried to protect his pregnant wife from the throng of shoppers inside.
“It was definitely the worst Black Friday I’ve ever experienced,” he said.
I don’t think pepper spray and pregnant women are a good mix.
I’m not really on-board with the anti-consumerist movement to delegitimize Black Friday. If people want to do that, I’m fine with it, but it’s not part of my political agenda. Yet, this story demonstrates just how stupid our society has become. Even without the pepper spray, the behavior of this crowd was disgraceful. They were fighting over video game consoles. People were fighting for the right to more effectively anesthetize their kids. Children don’t need better video game consoles. They need a clue. You want to compete with Indian kids and Chinese kids? Read a book. You want your kids to know something? Take them to a national park. Give them musical or language lessons. Teach them to swim. Get them involved in athletics or art.
When you are pepper-spraying people in order to get a video game console, your priorities are screwed up and your kids are doomed.
Agree with all of that, but there is a political angle to all this. It’s hard to be a good parent, ie read them a book, teach them valuable skills, when you’re working two jobs, struggling to make ends meet. Embracing video games isn’t a moral failing or laziness- it’s a rational response for parents that find themselves on the brink of poverty. It’s no different from the convenience of fast food or garbage reality TV.
Obama has repeatedly scolded parents for allowing their kids to waste their lives playing video games, both as a candidate and as president. But, in general, I don’t think that is a politician’s job. That’s the job of society to send a message of disapproval. I’d rather we all expect more from each other than wait for some politician to preach at us.
they are connected – the giant anesthetic that is anesthetizing gadgets and the desire for them is connected with a stressed out compliant work force. In some other cultures it’s alcoholism or something else.
I won’t be caught anywhere near a shopping mall this weekend, or any other time of the year, if I can possibly help it.
This is indeed why we can’t compete. The scariest aspect of this is that all the jobs programs in the world won’t make much difference while our culture is this fucked up at it’s core.
We try for a balance with the b2 boy. He reads, has been to some national parks, etc. But he has his video game time as well. It’s part of a range of activities. Most of his friends have similar arrangements.
Clearly, the folks at that Walmart handles things poorly. In all fairness it sounds like Walmart did too. Perhaps they should have handed out bracelets as shoppers appeared rather than having them jam the aisles.
I have always avoided Black Friday sales. One time a few years ago I was actually tempted with a DVD player priced at a low $48.00. Ultimately I decided not to get up early and go. Later that same day I needed to go into Radio Shack for some small item. There on the floor near the register was a small stack of DVD players at the price of….$48.00. No line, no waiting. Go figure.
Our little community has exactly the right perspective. We have no Walmarts…instead each year we have what is called ‘Christmas at the end of the road”, one has to drive the ‘long way’ over the lower mountain pass to get to our town where they are greeted by a town of historical old shoppes, a day of sleigh rides, dog sled races, old burn barrels lit to warm ones hands, hot cider on every corner and to top it off good local music and fireworks galore for an hour in the evening.
It’s a magical day and evening and gives me hope each year that there is some real sanity left.
I think we can squarely blame retailers who hype up the hysteria and put out incentives to induce the madness of crowds. Every year someone gets hurt in the melee. People are not responding in a vacuum. They are directly reacting to promotions that say the first 50 people get a TV for 50 bucks. Or, we’ve got X but we only have 200 of them so start camping out a week in advance. Or the drama of this incident: Making people form a line and WAIT for the unveiling of the stack till they got pushed got out of control. Now, of course, THAT’s no excuse for the nut who pulls out a can of Mace… or a friggin’ gun! But still, it would not have happened if the store hadn’t set it up that way from the get-go.
So then we can move on to blaming people for wanting an XBox in the first place. How stupid! And the consumer driven compulsion to give your kid this year’s Beanie Baby or Cabbage Patch doll. “Competitive shopping” as a gladiator sport. Woo-boy! People have their priorities completely out of whack.
Totally, we can blame the worship of Mammon in the name of Jeebus. WTF! How did the “season of joy” and the celebration of the Winter Solstice turn into a frenzy of avarice? That naturally brings us back around to blaming retailers who have developed our consumerist society since WWII, driving people to want what they really don’t need. The “War against Christmas”? Yeah, let’s launch one. Take the Christ out of the mass and call it what it really is: Happy Hellmas!
I see this backwards. Maybe it’s because I’m young. I actually don’t have a problem with kids playing video games in their spare time. I mean, after I finished my school work, it’s all I did (except in the spring when the school soccer season started). I had friends, but my parents were kind of strict. I got in trouble once just because a girl brought me home from school and we were ALONE!!! The horror!!! So I just kept to myself mostly and played computer games. I made money off of them by selling the online stuff for real money via PayPal as well. Something like $2,000.
No, the problem I see here is our consumerist culture that pushes people on edge to save $50 for a Wii console to the point where they break out pepper spray. Not to mention people end up getting trampled resulting in deaths at times. It’s ridiculous.
Hey, I’m old and I totally agree with you! The problem doesn’t lie with video games or letting your kids play them. My son played computer games obsessively and grew up to be a highly-paid database wizard. My grandchildren are addicted to hand-held Frogger gizmos that are very educational. The oldest could read, spell and do 3rd grade math by the time he was six!
The object of the desire is not the problem revealed in this news story. It’s the hyped-up desire itself.
It’s not the playing vid games or not, it’s the insane wanting of trivial stuff. And the passing on of that perversion to kids by parents who live in fear of not giving them whatever they ask for. Somewhere in the dark recesses of their minds, all those frenzied “bargain” hunters know that their prized trophies will be lost or forgotten in some closet in a few months, but that’s not enough to make them think even for a minute about controlling their corporate-controlled hysteria.
Screw “compete”. This is why we are at the very edge of becoming a society too disgusting to live in.
It isn’t just the video console aspect. People have rioted over Cabbage Patch dolls, Furbies, and Tickle Me Elmos. It’s the deliberately-planned hype that generates the panic buying, and it doesn’t even matter what the product is.
People become so wrapped up in the, “Oh my god, they’re running out!” hype that all they know is they want to get that special, rare thing before someone else does. Little Timmy will be crushed if he doesn’t get what every other kid has.
Which as usual, all boils down to greed. Greed on the part of the merchants, the manufacturers and the consumers.
Except playing with a doll is a normal, healthy activity for a young child. It is actual ‘play.’
It may be ridiculous to get in a tussle over buying a doll, but the item is largely harmless.
Not so with video games, which are going to do active harm to your child and his competitiveness. On almost any level you wish to measure, video games hurt children. Obviously, some are worse than others, and anything is fine in moderation.
But you don’t shove people out of your way to get your child a present he or she will use in moderation.
See my comment above to seabe. I don’t know jack about Xbox. Maybe it’s all shoot-em-up, blow-em-up crap. But SOME video games can be extremely educational, enhance your child’s competitiveness in a high-tech world and develop their brains in remarkably creative ways. There is also a quite developed social aspect to a lot of this game playing. With multi-player online games, children have direct communication with other children all over the world. My son and two grandsons just attended a Con for players of a video game where participants built robots, for goodness sake!
So no, you are wrong about this. SOME video games are harmful. MANY are idle past-times that relieve stress and are emotionally helpful to introverted or isolated children–and adults. And SOME are remarkable tools for building global consciousness and making the next generation highly productively competitive.
good points. the issue for me is balance between games and social interactions, dialog, give and take. I have no problem with video games for stress reduction either, because everyone needs that in our world. when these things permanently substitute for engagement with the people and world around, as the corporatocracy would like, that’s the problem for me.
I’ve heard the opposite. I’ve seen many studies that help kids’ cognitive abilities and their motor skills. Recently I saw a study showing surgeons who played video games performed the surgery 37% better (I can’t remember what the term “better” meant, but it wasn’t insignificant, and 37% is a large increase). If your kid does their homework before video games, there probably won’t be a problem. Besides, the kids out there marching in OWS are the video game generation, and they’ve got their heads set on straight better than the assholes currently running the show.
They’re certainly better than television. This is the second time I’ve seen you disparage video games, the first involving freedom of speech; you seem to have a personal vendetta against them.
If you are a surgeon or fighter pilot, that’s different. You are training for your job. And, while playing games may rewire your brain in ways that can be beneficial in certain circumstances (like reaction time) the overall effect (aside from being a huge time-sink) is to create a bunch of people who lack motivation and empathy. And every moment they aren’t exercising or reading is a moment lost.
Overall, the advent of a video-game generation is just devastating for our moral character and our competitiveness as a country.
The gamers are pretty much the only one who are competitive in your country. Who do you think works in hi-tech? How many of them do you you think gamed as kids or game now?
you have everything turned around backwards. Why is hi-tech totally dominated by foreign born workers? Because most of our youth are living in some Matrix world instead of learning hard sciences.
Can’t agree about dolls and the like. I think American Girl dolls, for example, are as toxic a corporate mindfuck as anything that lives on a video screen. Barbie dolls for guilty liberals. Total corporate control and co-opting of a kids most precious asset, her/his imagination. Just like McDonald’s happy meals crap and all the movie tie-in garbage, electronic or not. The real problem is, as stated, the deification of greed for endless trivial junk.
I don’t blame the consumers (blame the victim?) – how about a culture that offers more to the 99% than the hope of purchasing the latest gadget (or, if you’re a kid, the hope of receiving it as a holiday gift). And that’s where I see the Walmart shoppers, so strapped for cash they can’t offer their kids much, but want desperately to give them something. Heartbreaking imo. [latest Walmart incident, tasers http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/2137
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I don’t mean all Walmart shoppers, I’m referring to the ones that are getting into fights and pepper spraying
It’s the terrorists’ fault! Gotta buy before the next attack!!
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."We must ask…where did this idea of “Black Friday” originate? It has been around in other contexts for well over 100 years, but when and how did it…and shopping in general…become a disease on the face of the culture?
I personally put the real beginning of this disease squarely on the shoulders of the media and its dependence on advertising for revenue. I often use the words “hypnomedia” or “trancemedia” to describe the state of our radio and TV-based media system in the United States and also…to an equal or sometimes slightly lesser degree…in most of the rest of the so-called “developed” world. The most highly produced…and thus most hypnotic…content in the trancemedia lies in its advertising. The production values in TV advertising are so much higher than they are in any of the programs that they produce (w/the exception of major cable networks like HBO) that if some intelligent creature from another world or dimension were to study the earth’s current media content without any prior reference to or understanding of its place in the maintenance of the social order, the results of such a study would quite clearly show that advertising is the real “content” of the media and that the other 90% of what is produced is simply time provided for the minds of those who are watching to rest and to absorb what the ads have so efficiently been drilling into their minds and emotional centers.
“Black Friday?” On one of my most recent channel surfing safaris through the vast jungle of what we laughingly call our culture today I ran across an ad for Black Friday for…I believe it is for Kohl stores. One of the bigger discount chain, anyway. In it a 20-ish/30-ish looking middle class woman…almost certainly picked for her slightly white ethnic looks (a fairly large nose, big teeth, a little fleshier than the usual Anglo-ideal model) grimaces and poses through an ad where she chants some insipid “Black Friday, Black Friday” jingle phrase (“inspired” if that is the right word by the equally insipid Rebecca Black “Friday” thing hat went viral on he net some time ago) while waiting on line for the OH so desired opening of the Black Friday shopping orgy.
See it here if you haven’t. (And if Kohl’s lawyers haven’t forced YouTube to take it down out of legitimate shame for what they have done.)
When the doors open there is a shot of her flouncing down the aisle of the store. The very first action she takes is to reach out and grab something out of the shopping basket of some poor innocent who walks past her in the opposite direction, proudly skipping along as if she had just done something truly, outrageously good.
I was appalled. I really was. Here was a major retail outlet actually suggesting that women should fight for their right to steal goods right out of the hands of other shoppers!!! That they should be proud of what they were doing. How many steps away is this from using pepper spray to grab that desired bauble? Not many. Not very many at all.
I am rarely surprised at the depths to which advertising goes. This one shocked me. It really did.
Step away from the TV with your brins in the air!!! You have nothing to lose but your trance state.
Please.
Thank you and goodnight.
AG
(This has been another unsponsored message from the WTFU network. Wake the fuck UP!!!)
Nice hand to the face of an old lady, too.
The ad justifies horrendous behavior in their own stores.
No doubt it began when retailers got so strapped the rest of the year that they did not go from the red to the black in their accounts until around Thanksgiving. And the Christmas season became their sole ticket to profitability.
And it probably was an accounting folklore term long before it became a marketing ploy.
One of the interesting things about this is it tries to such the customer into caring about the internal operations of the retailer by caring about whether it makes it sales to go into the black. Not consciously, but that’s what the “Black Friday” terminology does, just like the auto dealer who complains that he has to move 100 cars by the end of the month. Or the day that fast food companies became to fast to say “side dishes” and cut it to “sides”.
Oh look, it’s intellectual snobbery time, supported by dodgy science.
<sigh>
Is too much screen time a bad idea? Sure. So’s too much of everything. Even reading books or playing music or athletics or art.
NOW GET OFF MY LAWN.
Parents setting limits, threre’s an idea…
Totally unAmerkin though.
Apparently, the woman with the pepper spray had her two kids with her as well. What a great example she’s setting for them. And she got away. Police are looking for her.
In pictures:
Egypt-weak hypnomedia
U.S.-strong hyponomedia
Same day, different goals.
Bet on it.
AG
The anesthetizing value of video games is one thing, and I’m not sure, in kids, it’s all that different from memorizing baseball cards when I grew up. Educationally dubious play is education nonetheless, and human nature besides.
But there’s also an emerging body of scientific evidence that repeated exposure to games and video/computer screens while the brain is still developing, esp. in pre-adolescent kids, fundamentally changes how the brain wires itself as it matures.
That ought to scare the hell out of any parent. But it usually doesn’t.
At least the new generation of games aren’t as physically sedentary as they used to be.
Between how we play, what we eat, how we live, and what we’re putting into our environment, it’s impossible to even count the number of ways we are conducting long-term, culture-wide experiments on the human body. We literally don’t have a clue what we are doing to ourselves as a species. By the time we figure it out, the damage is likely to already be permanent.
interesting. changes how the brain wires itself in what way?
one social impact I see is lack of awareness of ppl around a person; imo the combination to which you refer – food, environment, play etc is looking bad because it’s debilitating overall, leads ppl to marginal functioning
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Interesting overview of developing brain functions and plasticity from childhood through adolescence.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."very interesting, thanks
It gets ramped up to more of a fever pitch every year and comes earlier.
In the 1950s when I was growing up, the Christmas “shopping season” (I’d like to know when that phrase was first marketed) began on December 1. And in most towns in SC, the decorations in the stores didn’t go up until after the annual Christmas parade (that was it’s purpose, no doubt). And the city decorations went up the day before the annual Christmas parade. For some towns, that was as late as December 14 or 15–because area high school marching bands had a schedule that included more than one parade.
Then the day after Thanksgiving was when the decorations went up—replacing the harvest decorations in stores for Thanksgiving. And the sales were after Christmas to get rid of inventory by New Years to minimize state inventory taxes.
Now the season changes from Halloween to Christmas beginning on the day before Halloween. The food gluttony of Thanksgiving is followed by the shopping gluttony of Black Friday. And the frenzy continues until midnight on Christmas Eve.
There is only one end to this behavior. The bursting of the credit card bubble just like the housing price bubble burst.
But think of the jobs! As long as we remain in thrall to our obsolete economic/political notions, rampant greed is our only solution to keep the “economic growth” going, no matter what.
It creates fewer seasonal part-time jobs each succeeding year. And existing employees are expected to work more hours, but not enough to kick in state-legislated fringe benefits.
Piffle and pshaw.
You younguns obviously were never in Filene’s Basement — the original Basement in Boston, founded in 1909 — back in its heyday, when crazed shopper charges, merchandise-snatching, and bitter fights over goodies were de rigueur. The Running of the Brides is the most famous of the Filene’s Basement stampedes, true — an annual frenzy first held in 1947, I might add — but it was just one of many sale events that brought out the beast in Boston shoppers.
The company opened up outlets elsewhere starting in the late 1970’s, but the original Basement was the true shrine of shopper madness, and when it closed forever in 2007 a part of Boston mercantile history and culture died with it.
Is Black Friday as it stands now worse? Perhaps. Is the creeping expansion of Christmas-salery past Halloween and heading toward midsummer infuriating and revolting? Damn straight. But let’s not kid ourselves that this sort of insanity is some kind of new phenomenon.
Filene’s Basement sale in 1938 — look familiar?
And it wasn’t just the wimmenfolk at the Basement, either. Caption: “Intense male shopper pouring over SHIRTS $1 counter during Dollar Day sale in Filene’s basement which has racked up a record of $15,000 worth of sales in men’s shirts for the day. –Boston, MA 1938”
Damn, now I’m getting all nostalgic and stuff over my Basement bargain-hunting days way back when.