Lifestyle

Photographic Evidence Of Why You Should Never Leave Your House On Black Friday

by Mike Julianelle
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
The inside of a messy Nike sneaker shop, with the shoe boxes on the floor while people are still sho...
Image via Instagram

Black Friday was not kind to a Nike outlet that got demolished by overzealous shoppers

Every year on Black Friday it seems there are a handful of stories that make capitalism seem like a bad idea. Usually the issue is shopper-on-shopper violence, but at a Nike store in Washington state, the issue was violence against the store itself.

A story on BuzzFeed News details the carnage that resulted when shoppers stormed the Nike store within the Seattle Premium Outlets in Tulalip, Washington.

As evidenced by this picture that was taken before the Black Friday sale kicked off, it’s typically a pretty well-organized store.

It didn’t take long for excited consumers to lay waste to the wide variety of Nike goods and apparel. To the dismay of employees and customers alike.

Well, holy shit.

One local resident thought he’d swing by for a quick purchase of basketball shoes for his kids, but when Larry Downder entered the shop, he was shocked.

“I thought there was an earthquake that happened,” he told BuzzFeed

Apparently bargain-hungry customers were tearing boxes off the shelves, hunting for deals with seemingly no regard for anything else.

BuzzFeed spoke to another customer who’d aired his grievances on Twitter, and elaborated for the site. “Seeing little kids kicking things to the side with disregard — that kinda bothered me,” said SimpBoyJ (@CJibbs). “As parents were swimming through it, the kids had the same reaction.”

“We start walking through from aisle to aisle, and you’re walking over orange boxes everywhere,” Downer said. “People were just kicking stuff out of the way.”

One store worker told BuzzFeed that an estimated 20,000 people made their way into the store during the Black Friday hours, which ran from 8pm Thanksgiving night to 10pm Friday. That makes sense. It was either an insane amount of people or the trio of monsters in the old Rampage arcade game. Although they’d probably have to custom-order their sneakers, like Shaq.

That sounds like a joke, except one employee actually compared the scene to a famous blockbuster movie. “People were not putting anything back in the right place at all the whole time we were open,” the employee said, calling the whole scene “Jurassic Park crazy.”

One thing is for sure, Black Friday really brings out the monster in far too many of us.

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