Perhaps, I should clarify that title. It should read: “What Kind of Parents Take Their Kids Shopping at Midnight on Black Friday?”
Midnight, 4 a.m., 5 a.m.—-where were your kids at those hours?
I know where mine weren’t—in line outside of outlet malls that opened at 12 a.m., department stores that opened at 4 a.m. and Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us, and the slew of other retailers, which opened their doors to crazed bargain hunters at 5 a.m. Friday morning.
Still, if you watched the news tonight I’m sure you saw what I did. Hundreds of adults pushing stroller after stroller–stuffed with infants and toddlers–through double glass doors at discount and department stores.
In fact, if you looked closely at the video shown on NBC News following the horrific trampling death of a Wal-Mart worker in New York on this deadly Black Friday you would have seen dozens of babies in the background. If you missed the news, police say in the rush to score 50-inch Plasma HDTVs for $798 and 10.2 megapixel digital cameras for $69, hundreds of shoppers tore down the front door of a Long Island, New York Wal-Mart store and trampled a 34-year-old maintenance worker to death.
According to reports, the male worker tried to contain the growing crowd when the store opened for its annual Black Friday sale at 5 a.m. But impatient shoppers surged through the doorway, knocking the man down and killing him in front of dozens of witnesses, including his co-workers who tried unsuccessfully to rescue him from the stampeding masses.
“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” one Wal-Mart worker told the New York Daily News. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too. … I literally had to fight people off my back.”
What’s more pathetic is the fact that shoppers continued to step over the trampled man until police shut down the store.
One female witness told news reporters that the shoppers were acting like “savages.”
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,'” she said. “They kept shopping.”
A 28-year-old pregnant woman was also injured in the mad rush and taken to a hospital, where she and the baby were reported to be OK, according to police.
But getting back to my question about parents, kids and early morning shopping sprees, I can’t stop thinking of the video I saw on our local news stations showing dozens of deranged “adults” rushing into a nearby outlet mall at midnight pushing half-asleep kids in strollers.
What possesses parents to take their children from the warmth of their beds in the middle of the night and subject them to sub-zero Wisconsin temperatures (some of these people had lined up more than an hour in advance outside the stores, according to news reporters) just so they could save a few bucks on a DVD player?
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