Can We Stop Laughing At Videos Of Black Friday Brawls?

Thanksgiving has become a big television-centric holiday, with the Macy’s parade, Charlie Brown’s ertzatz dinner, the National Dog Show and football games. But so has Black Friday. After all, when was the last time you spent the entire day after Turkey Day without clicking on a video of a huge brawl at a Best Buy?

2017 has been no exception: Already, there is online video of a brawl at a mall in Alabama:

And another at an undisclosed location over a flat-screen TV:

It’s not just the United States, either:

As serious as the news stations portray the fights, the underlying message is always the same: Look at these rubes fighting over cheap TVs!

This is getting tiring. It’s not just that people are getting hurt — and remember, nine years ago, a Walmart security guard got trampled to death during a Black Friday stampede — but compling brawls at malls and big box stores into wacky clip reels just emphasizes how stupid Black Friday doorbuster sales are.

Google the phrase: “Laughing at Black Friday brawls,” and you get a series of YouTube complilations of people fighting each other over Xboxes, dresses, toys or whatever. And it’s not just the proverbial “guy in his basement” clipping these videos into “comedy gold”; major websites are doing it too, even ranking the fights by how “worse” they are.

It’s perverse, and wrong. Yes, there are nutjobs who camp out on Thanksgiving or Black Friday morning looking for $89 TVs. But there are also people who have to find these extreme deals, because they need to spread the wealth during the holidays with as little money as possible. So watching fights on the news isn’t just an exercise in watching capitalism run amok, but it’s also laughing at those who can’t afford to do it any other way.

In a way, seeing these brawl videos year aftr year acually encourages this behavior. After watching about fifteen years of videos like this, people go into doorbuster sales with this attitude: “I’m hyped up on pumpkin pie and booze and ready to crack some skulls at Kmart!” People are tired from a busy Thanksgiving day, it’s the middle of the night, and patience is at very low levels. It’s almost like raking up a pile of dry leaves and being shocked that flicking a cigarette butt in it sets it on fire.

In a way, these videos encourage retailers to keep offering limited quanities of sale items in order to stoke frenzies like this. Some have smartened up a bit. Many retailers have attractive Black Friday deals online, not waiting for the oh-so-’90s-named Cyber Monday to offer deals. Others, like Walmart, have set up systems to make things more orderly.

But the fights persist, as do the videos. The sooner we stop laughing at them, the sooner the brawls will stop.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.