The annual Black Friday shopping frenzy is notorious for deadly human stampedes, perhaps unjustly so.
Shoppers wait in line for the 8 p.m. opening of the Times Square Toys-R-Us store in the lead-up to Black Friday, on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 2012, in New York.
John Minchillo/AP
EnlargeUpdated 11:35 pm
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Here's a tweet that has been bouncing around twit-o-sphere today. It reads: "Black friday: because only in America people trample each other for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have."
The anti-consumption sentiment strikes a chord with many. But do shoppers really trample each other on Black Friday?
It's happened at least once: In 2008, Walmart worker in Valley Stream, N.Y., was crushed to death when some 2,000 early-morning shoppers ripped doors off hinges and surged into the store in search of Black Friday deals. As the Boston Globe reports Thursday, Walmart is still battling the?$7,000 fine by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for the incident.
And last year, in another notorious incident at Walmart, a shopper pepper sprayed her fellow bargain hunters at a?Los Angeles store. Apparently, she really wanted that Xbox 360.
Still, these incidents tend to be the exception rather than the rule. CBS News posted?a rundown of Black Friday injuries in recent years, and most of the?perpetrators?are robbers, not frenzied shoppers.
Still, tramplings happen. Here's an article from Slate offering advice to those planning to attend Obama's inauguration in 2009 on how not to become a casualty of humankind's herd mentality.
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 10:43 pm
Unlike the term "Black Friday," "Buy Nothing Day" doesn't really need explaining. Started by anti-consumerist activists in the early 1990s and later championed by Adbusters magazine, Buy Nothing Day encourages citizens to "take back" Christmas by publicly cutting up their credit cards, dressing up like zombies and ambling through shopping malls, rolling through stores in a long conga line of empty carts, or simply staying home and enjoying the company of friends and family. ?
More recently, Buy Nothing Day has been championed by those calling for a "Buy Nothing Chrismas."?
"By resisting the impulse to shop for deals on Black Friday we stand at the feet of the retail titans and, with the power of non-cooperation, we challenge the injustices of poor labor conditions, exploitative hiring practices, unfair monopolies, and irresponsible resource extraction," wrote?Aiden Enns, the editor of the progressive Christian magazine Geez in an op-ed in the Washington Post last year. Enns encourages Christians to "take a consumer fast" on Black Friday as a way of developing the power to resist temptation.?
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 9:33 pm
Chances are, you've heard that despite its ominous sound, the phrase "Black Friday" actually has its origins something positive, namely the first day of the year that retailers operate at a profit, or "in the black."
Like many widely accepted etymologies, this explanation is completely bogus. As linguist Ben Zimmer pointed out last year, the term "Black Friday" originally carried the negative connotations you would expect from such a phrase. One of the earliest known uses came from those worries about the Jacobite rising of 1745, and it was used again to describe the financial panics of 1869 and 1873.
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