Hooked

Chapter 13

Promotions

The Friday following Thanksgiving is known as ‘Black Friday’ in the US; it is the day when stores open their doors earlier and entice customers in with pre-Christmas sales. In 2008, a crowd of 2,000 eager shoppers burst through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart so that they could get into the store early and snap up the bargains before the rest of the throng; in their stampede, one Wal-Mart employee was knocked to the floor and trampled to death.¹

Black Friday appears to generally be an orgy of greed-driven mayhem; since 2006, there have been 89 injuries attributable to the event, there have been 41 reports of customers using pepper spray on one another, and in 2012 two people were shot.²

Consumers are not rational – contrary ...