Black Friday Ends Up Still In The Red By Way Of Customers’ Blood

I’m in the stockroom just before close on the day after Black Friday, prepping restock with my overnight staff. Suddenly, the doors slam open and a customer’s shopping cart appears, pushed by a younger teenage boy. Another two teen boys are standing in the cart. One is banging two pot lids together like cymbals; the other has a funnel to his mouth making noises like a trumpet. They circle a pole and head back to the sales floor. I immediately call the manager, who has already seen them and called in mall security.

I head out to the sales floor to meet the manager. As I approach him, we see the three boys rounding a corner, two still standing in the cart playing their “instruments.” They see us, laugh, and the boy pushing the cart starts to run. They smash through the door to the back room again, and a second later we hear a huge crash. The shopping cart has hit an empty pallet the boys didn’t see lying on the floor, and the two standing boys have been thrown out of the cart and into our corner belt, which slams into a nearby employee. Both boys are injured, one actually breaking his wrist, the other splitting open his forehead and breaking a tooth, bleeding everywhere.

Security arrives a few moments later and calls for an ambulance, and tries to ask the boys where their parents are. The boy who was pushing the cart says they were with his mother, but he has no idea where she is. He does know her cell phone number, though. She is called; she is all the way across the mall, and says she will come over once she is done shopping!

We see her coming, and she looks rather calm and smug until she goes outside. Her son is in the back of a police car along with the boy with the chipped tooth. The boy with the broken wrist is in the back of an ambulance about to pull away. The mother freaks out, crying and screaming, demanding that the kid in the ambulance not be taken to the hospital! The cops then reveal that they found shoplifted items in the pockets of two of the boys, including her son, taken from a different store, so they are going to be taken in.

The whole time her son is blubbering, “We just made a parade! It was a parade!”

There are threats of a lawsuit, but the videos basically make them drop the case entirely. We have to call someone in specially to clean up the blood, and the whole thing sets our restock back by a few hours.