Black Friday MADNESS: Watch This Lady Steal From a KID! (Or Don’t.)

URL copied to clipboard.
Screen_Shot_2015-11-27_at_2.43.12_PM
  • Source: www.youtube.com / Via: www.youtube.com

    Looking to reinforce your belief that Black Friday is evil and the masses of humanity suck? You’ve come to the right place!

    But it might be a hoax – and maybe you should consider your motivations for a minute first.

    One of the traditional submissions for 2015’s Worst Black Friday Shoppers Evar shows a crowd of people charging into a store and plowing into a large display of vegetable steamers, which they start grabbing and fighting over. One of them, a white woman, snatches a box away from a little black boy and starts brawling with his mother when she tries to take it back.

    “Get off of me!” the shocked mother screams, trying to hold on to two other boxes. “Why are you being so aggressive, you’re scaring me!”

    Because I still have trust issues after the Phuc Dat Bich debacle, let’s pause for a moment to wonder how this can possibly be real. First of all, I can see this kind of frenzy over PlayStations or something, but vegetable steamers? And while that mother must have been terrified by the ordeal, why does she need THREE steamers? Are all her friends and family going to get one this year?

    Also, people in the comments section are pointing out that the mother and kid were already holding boxes before the crowd charged in, and there appear to be black tape X’s on the floor like the ones actors use to stay in frame during a shoot.

    Which raises the question, why are we so eager to watch and believe videos like this one in the first place? Luke O’Neil of the Washington Post points out that this kind of spectacle is how rich people shame the poor:

    It’s hard to avoid the message of those ads. We’ve been bombarded with them for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective amusement. Look at these hilarious poor people, struggling to take advantage of a deal on something they might not otherwise be able to afford on items that we take for granted, we joke on Twitter. The message is the same: this is shameful, materialistic behavior. And by pointing it out, we differentiate ourselves, reaffirm our class status as being above the fray of the lowly and desperate.

    Let’s do better, people.

More headlines