There was a 50% off sale at a thrift store when I lived in Atlanta. The store was closed while they organized everything and there was a small indentation into the wall where the glass sliding doors where (it was a grocery store previously). There was such a crowd of people there clamoring to be the first in the door that they were pushing forward. I was crushed against the glass, my face smushed and it was getting hard to breath being wedged up against the glass. I was banging on the door in a panic to get the employees to open them, but I guess they thought I was just some crazy shopper who wanted to get in to get theh deals. I only wanted some cheap towels, I didn’t know it was going to be like this! At a thrift store! It was finally time to open and I almost fell down when they opened the doors because of all the pressure behind me. If I hadn’t of swooped around the corner once getting inside, I would have fell and probably been trampled. As it was, I don’t think I would have lasted much longer trying to breath being pressed up against the glass.
This is another reason I will never go to a Black Friday sale. That and my best friend getting a black eye from a 90 old lady in Walmart over a DVD player.
And people wonder why we don’t make laws in mob rule form.
Now THAT's funny...in a black humor sort of way. :)
Several years ago when I lived in Richmond, VA, one of the local school systems decided to replace their Apple laptops and sell all the old ones for $50 each. The demand was so high they had to move the sale from a county surplus warehouse to the Richmond International Raceway complex (which is also the Virginia State Fairgrounds).
On the morning of the sale, there were literally *thousands* of people out there to buy several hundred $50 laptops. When they finally opened the gates, there was a stampede in which several people were injured, old women with walkers were thrown down on the ground, children were trampled, the whole bit. All this for four-year-old laptops, most of which had problems of some sort, shot batteries, broken keys, etc., and many required hundreds of dollars of additional accessories. My wife almost got caught in that stampede, but thankfully, after seeing the crowds and the two-mile traffic jam to get in, she turned around and came home.
And the makeup of the crowd was very similar to what’s in the pictures in post #3.
}:-)4