Clothes are dispersed across the ground. It’s a war zone, and customers are flooding the floor so fast that employees have somewhat surrendered. Though the persistent campers outside of Best Buy may have bonded over having missed Thanksgiving dinner with their families, it is every man for himself inside as each fights to get his hands on the newest technology. Mayhem, pandemonium, bedlam. Three words that perfectly describe the fast approaching Black Friday.
Bill Rennie, Vice President of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, told BostInno that “This year, more than ever, you’ll see more discounts, sales, promotions. Retailers are really pulling all stops off the train.” The organization surveyed Massachusetts retailers, and the findings forecast a 3.5% increase in sales from last year.
Black Friday is generally all about the consumer, and all the buzz – where to shop, what to buy, how to carpe the retail diem – comes down to encouraging customers to embrace a sudden monetary splurge. But as someone who was once a Black Friday employee, I can tell you that working this day ain’t fun. It’s probably equivalent to being the designated driver on a very late night out, but at the end of the day – or night – someone had to do it.
Though we could all use a little preparatory lesson in shopping etiquette, I’m doing a 180 and focusing on the employees (those poor souls) who are forced to brave the trauma of working on Black Friday.
In a Reddit column that went up earlier this week, user Denton56 asked retail workers to share their Black Friday “horror stories.” I’ve weeded through the good, the bad, the ugly, and included some of the most entertaining responses below. The takeaway? Be good on Black Friday.
“When I worked at Sam’s Club, during the madness one black Friday morning, we caught a woman stuffing the inside of her pants with frozen lobster tail. She would unpackage them and throw the trash in a stack of tires that were on display.” – Nickdubs
“Ex Best Buy here. Four Black Fridays at the highest grossing store that day in the company gets you a few wild tales. This one is quick: Guy tried to shove a Panasonic Blu-ray player into the front of his jeans. He was a rather large man, but dude its a blu-ray player, seriously.” – gointhefridge
“Worked security at Target for 5+ years. For being a store in the rougher part of town, I don’t have too many horror stories. The funniest one I like to tell is a couple years ago, I was there early doing crowd control. I would always talk to people in line, try to keep them entertained while they waited in the cold. The first couple in line had been there for about 13 or 14 hours. So we open the store, and we have deals on all sorts of electronics, toys, etc. They get in line and have a shopping cart full of towels that we had on sale for $2. Thats it. Just towels. They were first in line outside and waited over half a day for $2 towels. When I left after my 12 hour shift, we still had shelves full of these towels, along with tons more in the stockroom.” – Lineman72T
“My first black Friday, I was working at a Walmart. I was assigned to be one of the employees that would cut open the plastic on the pallets which contained our merchandise, which were all in the floor. Basically, as I readied [the] box cutter, I got shoved by a customer and I fell right on it and sliced my hand open. After getting through that and [sic] patching it up, I came out on the floor and promptly got punched in the face when I picked up a DVD on the ground. A customer apparently wanted it.” – Wildfires
Image by Bryant Arnold at Cartoon A Day
