The Horror of Black Friday

Black Friday is normally on the day after Thanksgiving and started around the 1950s. The term “Black Friday” is from when stores would go from the red to black, red meaning the store was losing money and black meaning the store made a profit.

The stores will lower their prices on all the items for this one day which attracts a lot of customers so they make more money on that day than out of the whole year. Black Friday times are continuing to get earlier and earlier- in fact, they are starting as soon as five in the morning or even on the day of Thanksgiving.

There have been some deaths and injuries of workers and customers. In the past ten years, there have been a total of seven deaths and ninety-eight injuries.

The year 2011 holds the most injuries with forty-six injuries and one death and 2008 with three deaths. The worst injuries in a Black Friday event were a worker named Jdimytai Damour,a temporary worker at a Walmart in New York, was trampled to death trying to keep the doors shut. 

On Black friday at around 4:55 AM, a crowd of over more than two thousand people were pushing and banging against the doors. The ten workers that were on scene all alone trying to hold the doors back was no use against the giant crowd. Eventually, the doors gave way and most of the employees ran back when the glass shattered. Jdimytai Damour was thrown onto the tile floor as the entire crowd trampled him to death. He was pronounced dead an hour after he arrived at the hospital.

Another tragic Black Friday event was when a family of six were in a car crash after they finished shopping. Two out of the six in the family were killed and the driver was charged with vehicular manslaughter. The family was leaving the store at around 7 AM with about three hours of sleep total. On the way home, the father fell asleep at the wheel and collided into the shoulder on the left side of the rode. The CHP officer reported that the car flipped over a few times and then landed on its wheels.

 The final Black Friday tragedy was when three robbers jumped a sixty-four year old man named Bentley White and shot him for an electronic they wanted. The robbers broke into White’s home  around 8:30 am for a flat screen tv and cut their phone lines, stole their phones, and shot White in the stomach before leaving the home. They left the box on the road when they could not fit it in the car.  

This shows that no one is safe on any Black Friday and that people will try anything to get a simple discounted item at any costs. Be careful out there!