The Death Card Files ·

Shopper's Riot on Black Friday

Researchers found what really starts Black Friday fights. You've probably felt it too.

Overturned shopping cart in an empty store parking lot before dawn under amber streetlights

By Jack Malacat

Content note: This article discusses violence and a workplace death.

Shopper's Riot on Black Friday is a Death Card from my game, Serial Killer, and it's the one death in the deck I never had to invent. Every November, people I love set alarms for an hour no one sees on purpose and came home with a haul and a story. Some of the shoppers ahead of them, they told me, had slept outside the store. I never went. I was the willing audience on the couch, admiring the loot and asking who had been pushed.

Going back into the research behind this card, I found that Black Friday fights are about as well documented as any American ritual. Fighting, pepper-spraying, ransacking, robberies, and shootings have all been reported, and in 2008 the chaos killed a man who was only doing his job. What surprised me was what researchers found when they asked shoppers why they lash out. The spark, again and again, was the feeling of being cheated.

A day named for chaos

The name most likely came from people who dreaded the crowds. By 1961, Philadelphia police were calling the day after Thanksgiving "Black Friday," a jab at the traffic and crowds that shoppers brought downtown, and no traffic officer was allowed the day off. The cheerful story about stores finally going "into the black" came much later; its earliest known use dates from 1981.

By the 2000s, the crowds had moved from city sidewalks to big-box doors. Early on a Long Island morning in 2008, a crowd of about 2,000 broke down a store's doors, and a temporary worker who had been on the job about a week was trapped in a vestibule and asphyxiated. Federal safety officials later concluded that effective planning and crowd management could have prevented his death, and within a year they issued crowd-control guidelines for retailers.

The guidelines didn't end the fighting. On Thanksgiving night in 2011, outside Los Angeles, shoppers gathered around a crate of discounted Xbox consoles as it was unwrapped, and a woman pepper-sprayed the crowd, police said, to get an advantage. Twenty people suffered minor injuries. At the time, police couldn't say whether she ever got her Xbox.

What sets people off

Sharron Lennon, a merchandising professor, became interested in shopper misbehavior after seeing news reports of fights at her own local mall. Her team's first study cut against the image of a mindless, impulsive mob: the shoppers who put the most effort into planning and shopping the day were the ones likely to misbehave. If you mapped your route and set your alarm for 3 a.m., you had more to lose.

Stores build the pressure into the sale. Retailers promote their most desirable items at deep discounts, so demand for those few units outruns supply, while midnight openings and overnight lines leave shoppers short on sleep. When Lennon's team looked at what tipped people over, the size of the crowd mattered less than how the people in it behaved. Shoppers who saw others as unpleasant were more likely to feel the store was being unfair, and more likely to turn uncivil themselves. Losing out on a doorbuster works the same way: an advertised deal you can't get feels unfair, and one person's bad behavior makes others more likely to follow.

That's the feeling most of us would defend: the sense that we played by the rules while someone else cut the line. On an ordinary day it produces a complaint to the manager. In front of a crate of discounted consoles on Thanksgiving night, it can produce pepper spray.

Horror noticed the fighting too. Eli Roth's slasher Thanksgiving (2023) opens on a Black Friday sale at a superstore called RightMart, where three people are killed in the chaos. A year later, a killer in a mask of John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth Colony, starts hunting residents who took part in the riot. The film plays the stampede for gore, but its motive is the same grievance the researchers kept finding: someone took more than their share, and somebody has to pay.

Then the crowds began to thin. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and other big chains now close on Thanksgiving Day, and retailers have spread their deals over several days and moved more of them online. In 2025, Americans spent a record $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, while foot traffic in stores fell 3.6%. I always thought Cyber Monday was the smart way to shop: the same deals, no alarm clock, and nobody's elbow. My hauls arrived in a cardboard box, with nothing to tell.

The fight moves indoors

The cheated feeling came along, though. In 2024, Lennon and her colleagues asked whether Black Friday misbehavior had followed shoppers online. They found that the unfairness of an online sellout still stirred negative emotions, and with them the urge to take revenge on the retailer. Nobody gets pepper-sprayed when an item vanishes from a cart at checkout, so the anger has to land somewhere else. Maybe it becomes a one-star review, or a furious post typed after midnight.

Every November now, millions of us sit alone with a phone and watch a countdown timer run out on something we wanted. The card in my game ends with a riot in a store. I'm less sure how the real story ends. Did the fighting stop, or did it move to a screen where no one sees your reaction?

About the Author

Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.

Jack Malacat, Author of the Venom Haus Archives

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