The Darkness of Black Friday

Today is Black Friday in the United States of America. It’s traditional for the first Friday following the American Thanksgiving, for stores to start their holiday shopping sales, and for American’s to start their holiday shopping.

It’s also traditionally a time when American’s remind us all about our primal roots, as news reports always show rushes of people, trampling each other – sometimes even climbing over each other – to get first dibs on the cheaper merchandise.

Over the years, hundreds of American’s have died by being trampled, crushed, or simply stressed out and their hearts have stopped, by this American holiday tradition.

There have been a few reports of people having heart attacks at Black Friday sales. Whether or not they would have had the heart attack wherever they may have been at the time, and it just so happened to coincide with them being at a Black Friday event – we’ll never really know.

Those who have died by the rush of people crushing them like bugs as they clamour for on sale items are directly linked to this holiday tradition south of the border.

Hope we don’t see the same savage primal behaviours erupt on this side of the border, as this year many Canadian retailers are promoting Black Friday sales.

It makes sense from a business perspective. The economy in much of the world, including here in North America, hasn't recovered much – if at all – over the past decade. We've been up and down as the cycles of the economy typically go, but mostly we've been down, and when it goes down, it drops like a rock from the sky.

Holiday shopping is the big money maker for retailers across the world. It’s when people do most of their big ticket buying. And it’s also the make or break factor in going forward business decisions for the coming year for these retailers.

We’ll know which retailers had a great holiday shopping season this year, and which ones did not, come February or March – that’s typically when retailers that had poor sales during the holidays go belly up out of business.

And we don’t want any stores to go belly up out of business, because that means more people out of work, unable to spend money, in an economy that is already struggling to make ends meet.

The more people working, the more people able to spend money in that economy, and the better the economy goes.

It’s a vicious cycle.

But I sometimes wonder what is more vicious – the cycle of the economic ups and downs we all face, or the horrible experiences faced by those being trampled on Black Friday?

Maybe our economy is too closely linked with our primal animal instincts, and it is all the more clearly demonstrated by our uncivilized way we treat our fellow human beings, just to save some cash?

When Society and Social Media Go Bang Bang

When gunfire erupted at one of Canada’s most popular shopping malls, the social networks were a flurry of activity, showing the power and the danger of social media.

Last Saturday evening around the dinner hour, one person was killed and seven others seriously injured, after being shot in the Urban Eatery food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre. The Toronto Eaton Centre is one of the busiest shopping malls in Canada’s largest city.

People were tweeting pictures of the chaos as a stampede of people rushed up the escalators to escape. Others were uploading videos to YouTube, of scared shoppers huddled under tables trying to avoid being shot. 

Wait a sec – don’t you have to stick your arm up to shoot those videos on your Smartphone? How can you avoid being trampled in a crowd if you are busy typing out a tweet?

The immediacy of social media allows us to share what is happening right now. But that immediacy also can put us in danger.

Many local and regional governments have created laws against texting and driving – and rightly so. Studies show that distractions like texting and talking on your mobile device are just as likely to cause a deadly crash as drinking and driving.

But isn’t tweeting while being shot at an obviously dangerous—if not a foolish -- thing to do?

If I was being shot at, the last thing I would think of would be to pause, whip out my iPhone, and start shooting video. My first instinct would be to duck and run for cover.

We know that attention spans have dramatically become all the shorter in our modern age of 140 character tweets – but has common sense also become even less common?

The images and videos uploaded to the social networks began to “trend” as many started watching and re-posting the action as it unfolded. Major news networks here in Canada and around the world showed some of these videos and images too, giving instant fame to those who uploaded the content.

And hey – admit it – you want to have at least one thing you post on the social networks become so popular that it goes “viral” – right?

 

Though, if you get killed in the process of uploading that tweet, YouTube video, or “pic” to the other social networks, you may never know your post went viral because you’d be dead.

I admit I was glued to my seat, watching these images and videos appear live from the scene – it made for good TV.

However, I was watching all of this from the safety of my couch at home. 

Maybe I scare easily. Or maybe I just have enough common sense not to sacrifice my life for the chance to have ten-seconds of video shown on the nightly news?