It’s Pepper Spray Mania: Shopper Uses Pepper Spray at Walmart’s on Black Friday
Nov 25th, 2011 | 6 responses
Hey, we always knew it was a matter of time before pepper spraying really caught on among the general public. I mean, if a policeman can just ‘casually walk down a line of students sitting down and not doing anything violent and pepper spray them — basically spraying them because he didn’t like them – why can’t citizens do the same?
How long is it before citizens pepper spray each other at the workplace or relatives angrily arguing politics at the Thanksgiving table pepperspray each other (and if none is available just use regular pepper)?
How long before “Black Friday” came to signify the “black” in “pepper” and before a shopper who doesn’t like to be pushed and/or who wants to beat other shoppers to a limited bargain uses pepper spray for competitive shopping?
As of today the answer to the two questions in the paragraph above is: we are there NOW:
Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.”
Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.
“I heard screaming and I heard yelling,” said Lopez, 18. “Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up.”
Lopez said customers were already in the store when a whistle signaled the start of the Black Friday sale at 10 p.m., sending shoppers hurtling in search of deeply discounted items.
Lopez said that by the time he arrived at the video games, the display had been torn down. Employees attempted to hold back the scrum of shoppers and pick up merchandise even as customers trampled the video games and DVDs strewn on the floor.
“It was absolutely crazy,” he said.
Another customer said screams erupted after about 100 people waiting in line to snag Xbox gaming consoles and Wii video games got into a shoving match.
TMV coblogger Prairie Weather’s blog looks at this incident and asks “Are You an Effective Consumer?”
I’m not really on-board with the anti-consumerist movement to delegitimize Black Friday. If people want to do that, I’m fine with it, but it’s not part of my political agenda. Yet, this story demonstrates just how stupid our society has become. Even without the pepper spray, the behavior of this crowd was disgraceful. They were fighting over video game consoles. People were fighting for the right to more effectively anesthetize their kids. Children don’t need better video game consoles. They need a clue. You want to compete with Indian kids and Chinese kids? Read a book. You want your kids to know something? Take them to a national park. Give them musical or language lessons. Teach them to swim. Get them involved in athletics or art.
When you are pepper-spraying people in order to get a video game console, your priorities are screwed up and your kids are doomed.
About 20 people were on the receiving end in all; parts of the Wal-Mart had to be cleared, but the life-giving cycle of consumption was never fully interrupted. “I don’t care. I’m still getting my TV. I’ve never seen Wal-Mart so crazy, but I guess it could have been worse,” Nakeasha Contreras told the Los Angeles Times.
And indeed it could have been. Back east, “gunfire erupted at a North Carolina mall as holiday shoppers gathered.” (As holiday shoppers gathered… at 2 a.m., natch.) No one was hurt, and neither of the shooters has been identified (one apparently escaped into the mall). It’s unclear how the shooting is Black Friday-related, except in the general sense that the world has gone completely, utterly mad, and there is no way to stop it.
And so American society takes another step down in the rung of the coarsening of America. Things once considered brutal, bad manners, unthinkable, or way outside the mainstream surface — and are news And then, later, there are more and more copycat events. Until it’s no longer news.
Any day now I’m expecting my male cat to pepper spray the female cat when they race to use the litterbox.
FOOTNOTE: I wrote this and my computer pepper sprayed me. It’s going back to Best Buy NOW!
Photo via shutterstock.com
6 Responses to “It’s Pepper Spray Mania: Shopper Uses Pepper Spray at Walmart’s on Black Friday”
Most of the problems that have been pointed out in this article represent what society has accepted as normal behavior.
1.We accept the fact that we are being manipulated by big business that runs ads for items where they may have 10 or fewer items with a fantastic price to get shoppers into the store. Once they enter, they find the items sold out, so they buy a much higher priced item. Next year, the manipulation creates the need to be the first in line or become one that distroys something in order to get to the item before it’s sold out.
2. Individuals have been raised to believe that they have no responsibility to others, that society should bow down to their wants and needs and they will do anything to satisfy their desires. If anyone gets in the way, any actions are acceptible short of murder to fulfill those needs. Sometimes, even murder occurs to fulfill those needs.
As long a people allow others to manipulate them in the manner that large businesses are now manipulating them with big early discounts on a few items to promote other revenues, this will only get worse, not better.
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I participate in Buy Nothing Day wherein I stay home and don’t buy into the mania. My niece did camp out at Best Buy for a laptop coz hers died and she wanted a new one. She did end up getting a very good deal on an item she was going to buy anyway, so I am glad for her. As for me, I needed some groceries (and I’m headed out of town tomorrow morning) so I went to the local grocery store, where I found it was also participating in a kind of Black Friday markdown. Oddly, all but one of the things on my list was on sale. So I sort of participated, but only in that it just so happened the stuff I needed was marked down.
The whole black friday thing is commercial propaganda that foolish people get sucked into. Going out enmasse, buying a lot of mostly useless stuff – almost all of which is manufactured in China benefits who exactly?
I had to shop on Black Friday … I ran out of beer. Now there’s a crisis!
I blame corporate-think. The MBAs in Bentonville sit around their little spreadsheets and figure out how to milk the most value from every little transaction and create the best promotion to get the most customers in the store.
But they fail to care to understand the ramifications of their own actions. They are willing to put their own employees (of whom they have no interest, they’re just part-timers anyway and therefore less-than-human and undeserving of a safe work environment, much less health care benefits) at great personal risk from a frenzy of consumerism that Big Box created. They are so comfortable behind a screen of high-tech data analytical they probably haven’t even set foot in one of their own grimy stores.
This rampant consumerism is manufactured behavior. Manufactured by the very big-box stores who have ruined the country in so many ways.
I wonder if you can use it in chili verde, should you end up in an unkown restaurant and find the food bland? Just pop it out and squirt squirt, no problemo.