Four Dead Over a Parking Spot

The day after Thanksgiving, American retailers open their doors before dawn, slash prices by thirty percent, and then watch what happens. What happens, according to the site Black Friday Death Count, is that over seven years, four people died and sixty-seven were injured. Shot over parking spaces. Trampled in store entrances. Run over in crowded lots. A man stabbed because someone else wanted the same toy.

I used to find this baffling in a detached, anthropological way—filing it under "things Americans do that make no sense from the outside." But the more I think about it, the more it feels like something honest about how consumer desire actually works when you strip away the ambient numbness of ordinary shopping. The footage from these events looks like what that desire usually feels like on the inside: chaotic, stupid, slightly humiliating, and completely disproportionate to the object being fought over. A flat-screen. A games console. A winter coat at forty percent off.

The rest of us aren’t innocent—we just have softer edges. The late-night panic-run to whatever shop is still open when a long weekend arrives, the low-grade hostility in the checkout queue, the quiet calculation of whether the person ahead of you has too many items. It’s the same impulse. The people on that Black Friday footage aren’t a different species. They’re just further along the same continuum, in worse lighting, with cameras rolling.