Call Of Duty: Black Friday Warfare

It is Black Friday, and I am working in a huge superstore that is open twenty-four hours. This means we are setting up the Black Friday sale displays in front of the customers. Imagine a horde of ravenous zombies, licking their lips, with only a small plastic barrier between you and them.

I am setting up the video game displays, and a very popular military first-person shooter is going to go very cheap. I’ve had many gamers come up to me asking if it is possible to grab a copy early.

Me: “Sorry, sir, if you took a copy of the game to the registers right now, it would be marked as full price. You need to wait until midnight.”

Customer #1: “Well, can I grab a copy now and just wait until then?

Me: “I’m afraid not, sir. Customers aren’t allowed access to Black Friday sales items until midnight.”

As I am explaining this further to [Customer #1], another guy walks by, just as my coworker starts to put up the final sales sign, showing the price. This… was a mistake.

Customer #2: “Call of Duty for 70% off! Woohoo!”

With that, [Customer #2] literally crashes through the flimsy plastic barrier and grabs himself a copy of the game. Seeing this, [Customer #1] panics that he will lose out, so he decides to do the same.

Me: “Sirs! Sirs! The sale does not start until midnight! You need to—”

Too late; the zombies can smell blood. Within seconds, the display is being mobbed by about twenty hungry gamers, knocking over our hard work and screaming victory as they grab the plastic cases. The noise and chaos are enough to attract yet more customers, who engage in the same behavior until all the copies are gone.

This has also caught the attention of my manager, who comes up to my coworker and me as we survey the damage to the display.

Manager: “Do they know those cases are empty?”

Me: “I barely managed to get a word in. They’ll find out when they get to checkout and they won’t scan.”

Manager: “I guess I should make a store-wide announcement before our cashiers are mobbed.”

As it is 11:30 pm, on Thanksgiving, my manager is at the end of his tether, so he makes the following glorious announcement.

Manager: “Would the hundred idiots who grabbed empty display copies of Call Of Duty please return them to the display from which they stole them? Any customers caught carrying these display copies will be removed by security.”

The next half-hour or so saw a few embarrassed customers sheepishly return the cases, but most did not, not realizing that the actual physical copies would be brought out from the back at midnight and physically handed to customers who would be waiting in an orderly line. 

There were a lot of disappointed idiots at the checkouts that Black Friday!