Black Friday 2011 is already generating its first victims as shoppers in a Walmart located in the San Fernando Valley area of California were reportedly hit with pepper spray while they tried to grab Xbox game consoles. The Los Angeles Times reports that an unnamed woman in the crowd was apparently the source of the pepper spray, which was fired into the crowd a few minutes before the store was supposed to start its Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving night.
24 year old Alejandra Seminario said:
People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray. 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.
Seminario said that she was able to find what she was looking for but that Walmart was taking statements from people who had been hit with the pepper spray. She said, "After we paid, we saw five that were in really bad shape. They had been sprayed in the face, it looked like, and they had swelling of the face, really extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing."
It just goes to show that there are some people who take shopping and saving money way too seriously. If you"re bringing pepper spray to a Black Friday sale, that"s a problem.