Many supermarkets across the UK witnessed mayhem as eager shoppers fought to get their ‘Black Friday’ bargains. Source courtesy of The Independent.
Police were forced to intervene in supermarkets across the UK last week when ‘Black Friday’ Sales became overly-chaotic.
Many retailers take part in ‘Black Friday Deals’ in the run up to Christmas, including shopping giants, ‘Amazon’ and ‘EBay’. Every year more retailers jump on the ‘Black Friday’ bandwagon. This year the list included ‘Argos’ and ‘Very.co.uk’ and with increasingly large numbers attracted to these sales, this year saw more chaos than ever as consumers were eager for their Christmas bargains.
‘Black Friday’ – copied from the American tradition that sees shops slash their prices the day after Thanksgiving – has become increasingly popular in the UK, meaning that more and more retailers are eager to participate in the sales. However, the sales prompted a frenzy that saw mere bargain hunting get out of hand.
The large numbers who turned up to make the most of the sales was unsustainable, Greater Manchester Police claimed. The issues were “predictable” and blamed the shops themselves for not having a plan in place for this sort of eventuality. Conversely, Tesco claimed that there was no real frenzy, just a few over-zealous shoppers in some supermarket stores.
Amid the swelling numbers of shoppers attempting to get the most of the sales, the police had to be called to restore the peace. An ASDA store in Wembley, North London, became so chaotic that police were called to supervise after customers were injured during fighting and getting hit by electrical appliances.
Police were also called in places including Dundee, Glasgow, Cardiff and London. There have been predictions from VISA that £518 million was spent just on ‘Black Friday’. If this figure proves to be true, then it will be highest spending on shopping in a day in history.
The chaos resulted in broken limbs, arrests being made, several websites crashing and it is thought that ‘Black Friday’ Sales may even overtake Boxing Day Sales revenue.
‘Black Friday’ Sales may be a relatively new phenomenon here in the UK, but many including the police, now feel that next year, it must be more controlled. Appeals have been made for better health and safety procedures in many of the major supermarkets to prevent the mayhem from occurring again.
