So, Are Black Friday Sales Actually a Viral Promotion for “Hunger Games”?

I’ve never been a big fan of the early morning Black Friday sales.  One year my wife and I did get up very early in an attempt to buy a Nintendo Wii system.  Not at a sale price, just to be able to buy one.  It was the launch year, and they were hard to find.  The early morning quest accomplished nothing, and we eventually got one a week later using some interpersonal loyalty from the store we did a lot of business with.

Another year we went out about 7 a.m. after the big crowds were long gone and got my mother-in-law an inexpensive BluRay  player.  But that’s about it.  I’ve always been a little put off by the crowds, the pushing, and the sending people to work straight from the Thanksgiving Day feast table.

But I also have friends and relatives who really enjoy the challenge, ritual and social aspects of Black Friday shopping, so I know that can be just a fun way to start the holiday season.  It’s not all about desperately grabbing a limited number of specials.  And yet when my relative walked away from an overly long line in the wee hours on Friday, other folks started heckling her for not being sufficiently devoted to the hunt for bargains.

This year the post-Black Friday news involved security guards pepper spraying customers, customers pepper spraying customers, riots over cheap waffle irons, and the kind of violence that used to be associated with poorly managed festival seating rock concerts and British professional soccer games. (UPDATE: And that’s not to mention the fact that no one stopped shopping to help a man who collapsed at a Target store and subsequently died…)

In February of this year, The New Yorker ran a major article about the dynamics of crowd control, using the trampling death of a shopper at a Long Island Walmart back in 2008.

And all this makes me wonder: Have we reached the point where Black Friday shopping has become blood sport?

There’s a new movie coming out next year based on the best-selling young adult novel The Hunger Games that is sort of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery meets Survivor.  In it, a series of specially selected teens fight it out to be the final survivor.  Only in The Hunger Games, you don’t get voted out – you get killed.

I hope we haven’t reached the point where Black Friday shopping could be a thinly disguised viral marketing campaign for The Hunger Games.

So, how was your Black Friday experience?

Bonus Video: Steely Dan doing “Black Friday.”  Yes, I know it isn’t a song about shopping…