Black and Blue Friday? Only if you are the NY Times...

The NY times, which always manages to find the cloud in any silver lining, has an article about the horrible violence of Black Friday, with a couple examples of malls that had crowd-control issues and pushing. They claim that there is so much violence on Black Friday that people call it "black and blue Friday" (a term I had never heard of until this article, despite having dropped several hundred dollars every Black Friday for the last 5 or 6 years).

Sure, there is pushing, shoving, complaining, voucher scalpers, line cutters, and jerks at Black Friday. Combine several hundred tired and cold people with money to be made or saved and there are going to be a few jerks.

But in the six hours I spent outside the Somerville Circle Best Buy, I saw perfect strangers having conversations, sharing experiences, and in some cases sharing their seats and food, with people they had just met, people who they were competing with for a limited number of items. If the NY Times had gone to any suburban Best Buy or Circuit City or WalMart at 11pm when people were lining up, they would have found much more interesting stories. Instead, they went afterwords and found the couple examples of the negative, found the people who showed up late and found stuff sold out and were happy to have someone to complain to. Which suited what the NY Times wanted to show - that Americans are greedy bastards who would stab their mother for a cheap flat panel - even though I found that to be the opposite of what most people experienced.