“I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.” — Tammy Faye Bakker

Have a craving for news of Black Friday’s monsters? To lighten things up as we head into the next “festive” season, we thought about Black Friday-isms. Some say it’s an outrage that ruins the Thanksgiving spirit, but others of us can’t wait for the outrageous holiday shopping season.

When did it go wrong? Maybe it turned in 2006 and things started getting ugly. At a mall in Utah, 15,000 shoppers overwhelmed security and employees, tearing through merchandise looking for the best “doorbuster” deals. At a Virginia Best Buy, shoppers got in fistfights over line-jumping. And 10 people in California were injured scrambling for 500 prize balloons. But, according to Wikipedia, on Black Friday in 2013, a person in Las Vegas was carrying a big-screen TV home from a Target store on Thanksgiving and was shot in the leg as he tried to wrestle the item back from a robber who had just stolen it from him at gunpoint.

Investopedia states that the average discount on Black Friday is 37%. More Than 30% of Americans Shop on Black Friday. During five-day period from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday in 2018 , greater than 165 million Americans shopped either in stores or online - higher than expected, but down from the 174 million shoppers during the same period in 2017, per the National Retail Federation.

"Consumers are starting to feel a bit frenzied," said Fosina, founder and CEO of Fosina Marketing Group . "It's not even that they're rebelling. They're just less willing to move from store to store, even website to website." However, increasingly, the mania has migrated online, with a staggering 1000% increase in internet searches for Black Friday deals this year compared to last, according to research conducted by MyVoucherCodes.

Do Manufacturers Build Low-Quality Items? CNN and Forbes report that major retailers will often sell special electronics that are manufactured by big-name brands just for Black Friday and are of lower quality. According to Business Insider, “Most of the bigger deals are actually outdated products. Yeah, you have your new tablets and phones, but those will be very limited in both how many there are and how much you can save. Most of the biggest and most tempting savings come from products that are at least a year old or more and they have to clear out the inventory in the warehouses."

Goofiest tales: While working in a Victoria's Secret Pink store one Black Friday, a clerk reported they bent down to check on something for a customer and someone used them as a step stool so that they could reach a pair of yoga pants on the top shelf.

Another stressful incident from a clerk who relayed (paraphrased): The store had just set up our back of the store holiday registers, so they were still a little iffy when it came to glitches. When ringing up a man with a large number of jeans on one of the registers, he swiped his card and the reader crashed. After trying to reboot the register, the customer gave a glare of malice and then proceeded to yell, if the payment goes through twice it's all your fault. Before storming off, he looked me straight in the eyes and said “Nobody loves you.”

This pressure can be very intense—officials have found metal beams bent by the force of a group of human bodies, beams that take over 1000 pounds of pressure to deform! Read more from Belief Net

One year, the creators of the popular party game Cards Against Humanity decided they wanted to get in on the Black Friday shopping madness. So, they advertised you could pay $5 for nothing on Black Friday. All items normally for sale on the game's website were removed and replaced with a single payment form that people could use to just give the company $5 and receive nothing in return. Shockingly, more than 11,000 customers went for it, and the company raked in $71,145! Although Cards Against Humanity had a history of donating to charity, that year the company chose to distribute its windfall to employees as a holiday bonus. Could be a new type of company policy?! Only on Black Friday…

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