Black Friday

I don't much care for crowds, but this is sad and ridiculous:

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy…

The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee,…

The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

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And then there's this one:

Two people were gunned down and killed Friday inside a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, Calif., authorities said.

"We have two dead individuals inside the store," Gutierrez said. "The events of why the shots were fired is still ongoing."
The store is on lockdown, and KTTV in Los Angeles is reporting that a 6-year-old girl was one of the victims.

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I can believe it.
Yesterday, on our way to our family Thanksgiving, we stopped at a WalMart so I could run in and get a card that I'd forgotten to grab a couple days ago...
The employees were moving these big skids of stuff that was all wrapped with black plastic that was due to be the "black Friday" sale stuff for this morning. While they were moving the skids, customers were shoving each other out of the way and ripping the plastic to try to see what was inside. The employees were saying, "please, sir...don't do that!" and "Please, ma'am, that's for tomorrow...you're not supposed to!"
It was like they were sharks in a feeding frenzy.