Pepper Spray Friday Revisited
by David Atkins
A few days ago I wrote sarcastically that Black Friday shoppers should be pepper sprayed instead of Occupy protesters, since Black Friday chaos has caused death, paralysis and other serious injuries, while the same can't be said of OWS.
Well, perhaps I spoke too soon:
Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was "competitive shopping."
Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.
"I heard screaming and I heard yelling," said Lopez, 18. "Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up."
Lopez said customers were already in the store when a whistle signaled the start of Black Friday at 10 p.m., sending shoppers hurtling in search of deeply discounted items.
By the time Lopez arrived at the video games, the display had been torn down. Employees attempted to hold back the scrum of shoppers and pick up merchandise even as customers trampled the video games and DVDs strewn on the floor...
"People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray," the Selmar resident said. "I guess what triggered it was people started pulling the plastic off the pallets and then shoving and bombarding the display of games. It started with people pushing and screaming because they were getting shoved onto the boxes."
The pepper spray wafted through the air, Seminario said, and she breathed some in and started coughing. Her face also started itching....
Wal-Mart employees were taking statements from about eight customers who had been pepper sprayed near the front of the store, Seminario said. "After we paid, we saw five that were in really bad shape," she said. "They had been sprayed in the face, it looked like, and they had swelling of the face, really extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing."
Nakeasha Contreras, 20, of North Hollywood, arrived at midnight and hadn't heard what happened. Even if she had, she said, she wouldn't have been bothered: "I don't care. I'm still getting my TV. I've never seen Wal-Mart so crazy, but I guess it could have been worse."
You can't say the average American consumer doesn't have their priorities down pat. As long as there are more people willing to brave pepper spray and overnight camping in the cold in order to pay a big corporation for a gadget, than there are people who will do the same to save the safety net and demand economic justice, something tells me our economic overlords won't be too scared of us.
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