Every year, Black Friday gets earlier and earlier and the sales get better and better.
Which means that the people who flock to stores are getting more aggressive to knock out their competition and get their hands on the deals of the season.
Reddit's Ask Reddit section has two majorthreads from last year that asked retail employees to dish on their worst Black Friday horror stories.
Though we can't verify that all of the following tales are real, they'll make you think twice about going shopping on Friday.
"When I worked at Walmart, we had a fight break out over a bike."
"Back in my poor college days when I worked at Walmart we had a fight break out over a bike. Fists were thrown and there was some blood. Eventually one guy got ahold of it and managed to get away from the crowd, he rode the bike out of the store to flee his pursuers (without paying)." - KnowMatter
"I punched a guy in the face who tried stealing a Xbox 360 from an 11-year-old."
"So it was the year the Xbox 360 came out. I was standing in line to get some external hard drive next to the video games. And there was this 11ish-year-old kid with a woman in her 60s. He was waiting for his 360 bundle. The woman before him had 'gotten the last one,' sighs all around. Then he says 'nope one more' and begins the motion of handing it to the kid and this guy comes out of nowhere and pushed the older woman and the kid. The kid hit his face on the edge of a video game rack, you know the one with the metal and plastic dividers. At 19 years old, I don't know what came over me, but I instantly swung for the dude's head and caught him right in the temple sending him into a Keurig tower in the middle of the Isle. Everyone froze, including me. Guy had dropped the 360 and got up and walked away. I slid it with my foot to the kid and he didn't say anything either." - Ruckus55
"A couple waited over half a day for $2 towels."
"Worked security at Target for 5+ years. For being a store in the rougher part of town, I don't have too many horror stories. The funniest one I like to tell is a couple years ago, I was there early doing crowd control. I would always talk to people in line, try to keep them entertained while they waited in the cold. The first couple in line had been there for about 13 or 14 hours. So we open the store, and we have deals on all sorts of electronics, toys, etc. They get in line and have a shopping cart full of towels that we had on sale for $2. That's it. Just towels. They were first in line outside and waited over half a day for $2 towels. When I left after my 12 hour shift, we still had shelves full of these towels, along with tons more in the stockroom." - Lineman72T
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