This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Bacchanalia . . . Everywhere You Go

Welcome to the pagan holiday that celebrates the sin of aquisitiveness and purposefully entices the passions. Of course, it attempts to highjack the Christian holiday first by celebrating it for four weeks prior to the Christian holiday itself, and then by manipulating its religious adherents--known as consumers--by manufacturing emotions and having them seek out pure illusion. But it is truly an anti-Christian celebration in that its sole focus is wholly antithetical to Christian belief.

Let's take a look at its annual ritual.

Shopper Fights With Security Guards At Orlando Wal-Mart

One man told reporters that the laptops were being thrown into the air and people rushed toward them, collapsing on each other. Another man described the scene as crazy.

"It was absolutely pandemonium in there. They were throwing laptops twenty feet in the air, and people were collapsing on each other to grab them. It was ridiculous," said shopper Brian Horwitz.

"A guy came on top of me and hit my head," said Wal-Mart shopper, Jennifer Harris. "When he did it bounced against the other two people. I got hit on both of my ears."

Some people weren't fazed in the least. Many customers simply carted their stuff out of the store and passed right by the man in handcuffs, without any reaction.

Shopping season off to a wild start

The holiday shopping season kicked off Friday with a near-riot at the Wal-Mart in Mountain View as early-morning bargain hunters jostled with each other to get their hands on discounted laptop computers.

Police were eventually called to calm unruly shoppers who climbed over a display case and shouted in a desperate effort to get their hands on one of a couple-of-dozen Hewlett-Packard notebook computers -- on sale for just $22 off the regular price of $400.

While such Homer Simpson-like behavior wasn't the norm across the Bay Area, it gives new meaning to the so-called door-buster sale campaigns retailers used to lure the buying masses at the start of the season, which represents about a quarter of their annual sales.

More stores than ever opened at 5 a.m., including Kohl's, Mervyns, Fry's Electronics, J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart. They enticed shoppers with promises of eye-popping discounts on portable DVD players, jewelry, laptops and LCD TVs.

Even Apple Computer jumped into the special Black Friday discounting frenzy. In an unusual move, the Cupertino company dropped prices of its new iMac G5 and its PowerBook G4 by $101.

After the Mountain View Wal-Mart opened at 5 a.m., hundreds of shoppers stormed inside, many charging the electronics department, where HP Pavilion laptop computers were selling for $378 for six hours only. The model normally sells for at least $400, according to Hewlett-Packard.

Customers sprinted to the counters, some leaping over them into the area where panicked clerks stood. A nearby display case was crunched to the ground, broken, witnesses said.

``I heard a mother yelling at her child saying, `I told you, you needed to be aggressive, you needed to get that!' '' recalled shopper Debbie Pavao, of Santa Clara. ``And you could hear this young child saying, `But Mom, but Mom!' . . . The child couldn't have been more than 10 or 11.''

Within minutes, police showed up and order was restored. No arrests or injuries were reported.

A manager at the Mountain View store, who would only give her first name as Marilyn, downplayed the ruckus, calling it ``just a normal blitz day.'' . . .

By 8 a.m., the parking lots at Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara were jammed and late-to-the-mall shoppers were circling for open spaces like sharks.

Shoppers, weighed down by multiple bags, slowed only for quick breathers or a bite to eat before resuming the hunt.

``It's tradition,'' said Trieu Nguyen, who showed up at the mall with his fiance, Katherine Chan, 26, before 6 a.m. He actually began his holiday shopping Tuesday, when he bought her an iPod nano.

``The alarm rang at 4 a.m.,'' said Chan, recalling the start of the shopping day like a bad memory.

Shoppers find sales worth fighting for

Here's a look back at two decades of buyers behaving badly, as chronicled in various media reports:

# December 2004 - Two women and a teenage girl are arrested after they get into a fight over a parking space near a Toys "R" Us in West Hartford, Conn. One woman threw an orange peel at the other woman's car.

# December 2002 - A 41-year-old man is arrested after stealing another motorist's parking space, yelling at the driver and eventually spraying him with Mace at a mall in Connecticut.

# November 2002 - Shoppers stampede a Riverside, Calif., Wal-Mart store, running over a 35-year-old woman and fracturing her foot and hip.

# November 1998 - Frantic "Furby" shoppers bite one woman and knock another down at a Wal-Mart in O'Fallon, Ill.

# December 1996 - A Wal-Mart employee in New Brunswick, Canada, is sent to the hospital after a crowd of 300 "Tickle Me Elmo" shoppers tramples him.

# December 1993 - Drivers abandon their cars in the streets outside a Toronto shopping center, eager to get to the day-after-Christmas sales. A police officer said he ran out of $20 parking-ticket slips ticketing the vehicles.

# December 1992 - A 24-year-old clerk at a Toronto Sport Shoppe in Canada is kicked, punched and bitten by a group trying to grab products from shelves. Four people were arrested, and the clerk was sent to the hospital.

# November 1983 - A 75-year-old man is knocked down by shoppers trying to get to Cabbage Patch dolls at a Jefferson Ward store in North Miami Beach, Fla. That same month, shoppers in Washington, D.C., offer bribes to store clerks for access to the dolls.

Posted by Clifton at November 26, 2005 05:55 AM | TrackBack