(Credit: Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
If you look up Black Friday on YouTube, you’re bound to find a lot of videos with terrible titles like “Black Friday Fights,” “Black Friday Disasters” or “Black Friday 2012 Madness.” But the horrifying stigma of this day doesn’t seem to scare the thousands of brave Americans that voluntarily run into the big box store crowd, fighting for killer deals on last year’s food processor.
Like with all other extreme sports, you need to prepare for Black Friday shopping. We went to the best: Mark Hellmann Regouby. Is Regouby an experienced Black Friday shopper? Not really. But he’ll do you one better. He’s the founder of the travel company Running of the Bulls, Inc., which takes tourists running with bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Here’s his advice for braving big crowds, which seems strangely applicable for both the Running of the Bulls and Black Friday.
Before you go in
“We tell them … watch the Bull Run first so they can see how it works and understand the flow of the people and the bulls and make their strategy from overviewed conditions,” he says. This is where the aforementioned YouTube search for Black Friday videos will come handy.
But the preparation doesn’t stop here. If you were planning to hit the bottle to take the edge off of Black Friday shopping, you’d better think twice.
“The No. 1 rule is to arrive sober,” Regouby says. “No. 2 is to get a good night’s sleep. No. 3 is to have 360-degree-awareness. Always try to be aware of who is in front, behind and beside you. Really get a sense of being in the place.”
Surviving in the heat/battle
“The best runners always say you stake out your territory,” says Regouby. “You use your arms and don’t let anybody get too much in your way. Swing your arms and keep in your elbows to make sure you’ve got your own space that you need in order to run without tripping.”
This sounds extreme, but seriously, do you want that food processor or not?
If you go down
There have only been 15 deaths since the beginning of the Bull Run in Pamplona in 1910, but broken wrists and chin bleedings are usual. According to Regouby, there are more falls and injuries because of humans tripping over each other than because of the bulls. We can with pretty certainty say the same about Black Friday, except that the National Retail Federation has only reported one Black Friday trampling death — a Walmart employee was stampeded in 2008. So what do you do, if you go down?
“The most important rule of all is if you go down stay down. The bulls are actually talented at stepping over obstacles and as long as you cover your head and stay down and don’t move they can plan to step over you.”
We can only hope the same counts for the herds in Best Buy and Macy’s. Actually, we’re going to say that the people waiting in the cold to buy stuff at discount prices are NOT talented at stepping over obstacles, so we advise just trying to roll to safety!
When you succeed
Regouby says that a run like the one in Pamplona is for people who want to be in touch with their own mortality and live their lives to the fullest.
“I have done it four times [run the Bull Run in Pamplona] and it’s still pretty incredible,” he says. “You arrive in this huge arena and the sun hits your face and the air is fresh again and you can’t believe you are alive.”
That sounds a bit like waking up way too early and shortly later bringing a full bag of discount goods to the parking lot and realizing all of your arms and legs are intact after a Black Friday, right?
The post Black Friday can get nasty, here’s how to survive appeared first on Metro.us.