Tis the season to act like animals

How much would you humiliate yourself to save $22?

Police were eventually called to calm unruly shoppers who climbed over a display case and shouted in a desperate effort to get their hands on one of a couple-of-dozen Hewlett-Packard notebook computers -- on sale for just $22 off the regular price of $400.

Think this through, people. Twenty bucks off a four hundred dollar item is a whopping five percent savings - this is a deal? Also each store has about twenty of these. So only twenty people are going to get one. If there are more than twenty people in line at 3 AM, you are NOT going to be one of them.

When did people start buying into this? For the modest cost of around 400 dollars (the 22 dollars they did not make on the sale of 20 computers), stores get hundreds of people to stampede in their aisles. You know that the 980 people who did not get a computer didn't just say 'oh well' and leave - no, they stayed and shopped for other things.

Fools. You were had.

UPDATE: Promoted from the comments section - Early Morning Shoppers Pepper Sprayed At Beaumont Wal-Mart. Beaumont, if you recall, was evacuated during Hurricane Rita, and evacuees were famously not allowed to leave the buses even to go to the bathroom until they reached their destination. I guess empathy isn't something you can learn, is it?