Black Friday

[sadler]

The absolute greed and stupidness of some of the human race really annoys (would use a stronger word but would be banned) me! As Martin Lewis frequently spouts, "if you don't need it, won't use it or can't afford it, don't buy it".  How many of us in the western world will be deluged with useless "tat" this Christmas which will be put in cupboards then taken to charity shops in an effort to appease a pricking conscience and labelled as unwanted gifts? As Highlander points out, he has only recently made an appeal for families who don't have warm clothing this winter. I wonder what they think of the disgusting show of greed and brain washed stupidity shown on the news last evening. Well done big retailers, you played a blinder!

[kevin3]

The police should refuse to turn up to sort out this chaos.
The supermarkets created this monster for reasons of pure greed.
They should pay to manage this mess, not the tax funded police service
Absolutely disgusting spectacle, bunch of animals.     

[KKOB]

The police are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they don't attend they'll be lambasted.

I work in security and there's no way that police or any amount of security guards can control the behaviour of these people. They're just driven by shear greed and Black Friday is being hyped-up by the retailers and the media each year.

As for your comment about "the tax funded police force", the retailers pay taxes too.

[kevin3]

Fair comment KKOB but these are avoidable disturbances, created by the retail sector for profit.The retailers
have been boasting about how many billions they will take on Black Friday, this weekend and the run up to
Christmas.They should factor in the cost of crowd control or they should be banned from holding these events.
The police have the powers to apply to get them banned on public disorder or safety grounds.
I can remember lots of local kids parades, boy scouts parades, marches ect that were cancelled because they
couldn't afford to pay for police escorts and insurance costs and on Health & Safety grounds.

[KKOB]

I think the whole thing was underestimated. The retailers didn't give much thought to crowd control until it was too late and the police were just overwhelmed because of the number of "troops" that are required to police most towns and cities during the late evening and night-time on Fridays and weekends.


Our company, and quite a few others were contacted on Thursday afternoon because some stores foresaw the problems, but they'd left it far too late to get the necessary cover.

Quite frankly, after seeing the way in which people behaved this year, I for one won't be volunteering for duty next year.