Black Friday shopping got more real than a Whole Foods parking lot.
Between the hordes of high school kids running from store to store and platoons of middle-aged ladies double-fisting shopping bags, I’m surprised I didn’t get knocked out in the shopping excitement—or maced in the face.
I started off my midnight journey at Macy’s, which was already packed when I got in there. Women fought over boxes of shoes while uninterested husbands and their wide-eyed children stood nearby, watching in disgust. The speed at which these women whipped out their credit cards would make a cowboy blush.
After strolling around Syracuse’s Carousel Center mall for about an hour, I made my way over to Black Friday ground zero: Walmart. Outside, the store looked like a heavy metal parking lot. Two cop cars, a dozen Walmart employees, and a maze of metal gates greeted customers. Inside, it was pandemonium. Cashier lines snaked through the store, customers complained, and countless employees stood in every aisle, glaring at every customer as they walked by.
Luckily, no one brought any pepper spray. Which is more than I can say for the Porter Ranch Walmart in southern California where late Thursday night a woman “armed herself with the caustic spray to gain an advantage in the fight for merchandise at the Black Friday sale,” reported the Los Angeles Times. The woman injured 20 customers. She is still at large (and probably out of spray).
In the end, I was too busy tweeting and taking in all the excitement to actually shop. And considering some people were waiting in line starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, there was no way I was going to get those righteous deals. Here are some other observations I made throughout the evening.
Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III / Photo by purplemattfish
