Monday, November 29, 2010

Black Friday

Just thought I would blog about all the sales and shopping that went on on Friday for this week. I do have to admit that I participated in Black Friday. My mom and I got up 2 AM to go shopping at 3AM. After a long morning of shopping (I didn't get home til around 8 AM), I ate some breakfast and listened to the news.

It was crazy about how many people they predicted to participate in the chaos shopping. They predicted 4 million more people would be shopping that day. And their reasoning for going shopping was to spend less for Christmas. Many stores decided to open up before early Friday morning and opening Thanksgiving night, ie Toys R Us.

The National Retail Federation came up with outstanding numbers for Black Friday and its weekend. For both online and store shoppers, there were over 212 million people after those Day After Thanksgiving sales. There's an estimated $45 billion spending. People spent an average of $365.34, which is up from last years number, $343.31. The number of people shopping at midnight tripled from last year, 3.3% in 2009 to 9.5% in 2010. By 4 AM, almost a quarter of the Black Friday shoppers were already at stores shopping.

I wonder how much of the packaging these items come in will be recycled and how much will end up in the landfill in the next six months.
Now that I've shown you the insane numbers. I wanted to show you some insane pictures from Black Friday.

 
Here is Toys R Us Thanksgiving night, which opened at 10 PM. One article said that Toys R Us' new game is Black Thursday.

This is a store in Canada.

This is Old Navy in Hunington, West Virgina.

This last one is a video and I'm so shocked at how much people don't care about others and only care about getting what they want. In this video, as people are pushing and shoving to get into this Target, a man gets trampled on and no one stops. They just keep going and stepping over him until after about 10 seconds go by, people finally start helping him. Even then, people still step over and don't care.


1 comment:

  1. That video is shocking!
    It brought to mind the things we talked about in social psychology though, how people don't identify a situation as an emergency until it's too late.

    ReplyDelete

Do you use reusable bags when you go grocery shopping?