Humans who are chronically forced to wait acquire a different skill: they learn to seize fleeting opportunities.”Īccording to Alter, man’s genetic impatience is what drove Thomas Zych’s write-in presidential campaign, one forged on the platform of abolishing alphabetical order.
Researchers tested different kinds of monkeys to see which are more patient than others, finding that “patience is learned rather than endowed.” The New Yorker’s Adam Alter writes, “A monkey gets better at waiting when he waits more often, just as a weightlifter becomes stronger the more he lifts weights. If these incidents sound familiar, it’s because most of us have been in a Black Friday crowd that’s gotten a little crazy-and some of us are just as guilty.Ī report from the New Yorker suggests that Black Friday madness is hard-wired into our DNA. As BuzzFeed and CNN report, Arizona police “body-slammed a grandfather who had tucked a video game under his waistband to carry his grandson above the crowd.” BuzzFeed’s Kevin Tang continues, “ The man laid in his own blood for 10 minutes as cops handcuffed him and charged him for shoplifting and resisting arrest.”Ģ: It brings out the worst in human nature.
Should you survive the crowds, you can still be pepper sprayed, robbed, or beaten by cops in an instance of alleged police brutality. In a Toys ‘R’ Us incident, two people were shot and killed, and a Best Buy worker (a Marine who was volunteering with Toys for Tots) got stabbed during an altercation with a customer. In previous years, retail employees have been “ trampled to death” by Black Friday crowds, and in another stampede, rabid shoppers walked right over a dying man. That might seem like hyperbole, but only barely. The most obvious case against Black Friday is that it brings out the worst in human behavior, a Lord of the Flies-like scenario in which consumers are driven to tear each other apart for a good deal.
Here’s why it might be best to stay at home this time around. Since catching on with retailers in the 1970s, Black Friday has become the “Super Bowl” of retail.īut it’s not just the biggest shopping day of the year-it’s also the worst, characterized by long lines, horrible traffic in mall parking lots, and high rates of violence. Every year reports trickle in detailing the slow retail takeover of Thanksgiving, as Black Friday sales eke further and further into America’s favorite excuse to eat too much turkey and watch seven Bond movies in a row.
Bill O’Reilly and Fox News might be wringing their hands over a War on Christmas, but that’s not the war we should be worried about.
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