People want to compare Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Black Friday (BF). I see it frequently on my newsfeeds and social media, plus I heard it a lot over the past few days as I was out and about. Sure, they both involve crowds and camp-outs, but does that really mean they can be compared? Lots of OWS supporters are saying how the crowds and camp-outs for BF are acceptable (OWS also tries to broaden this to include camp-outs for tickets to sports and the recent Twilight movie), but when OWS tries to form crowds and camp-outs, they get brutalized by the police (we’ll leave aside the question of whether it’s appropriate or excessive force for now). That OWS wants to compare themselves to BF is highly amusing because the two are so different, there’s nothing meaningful to glean from comparing them.
First, we’ll talk size. Exact numbers aren’t readily available or verifiable yet for BF, but I think it’s reasonable to guess that tens of millions of Americans participated. Maybe even 100M is reasonable. I’ve heard estimates as high as 150M, but that would mean literally every other American was out shopping on BF and I find that hard to believe. So, let’s just leave this in the tens of millions and up to 100M. I looked previously at OWS’s size and haven’t revisited that in a few weeks. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just assume that OWS has grown in size directly proportionally to the growth of followers of @OccupyWallSt on Twitter. It was about 57,000 and it’s now about 130,000, which is a little more than double. My largest estimate in that OWS post was 464,000 people, so if we apply a similar growth factor, we’re just over a million. We have a million or so in OWS versus tens of millions or up to 100M out on BF, meaning BF is 1-2 orders of magnitude bigger than OWS.
Next, let’s look at duration. OWS has made it very clear that their goal is an indefinite occupation of their campgrounds. They’ve tried to hold their ground for weeks, even months as time drags on. By contrast, BF shoppers camped out for a couple nights, maybe a week in a few hardcore cases. However, the BF crowd did their shopping and went home. There aren’t many, if any, campers still outside stores. BF was a very short duration with a clear ending date. OWS is not.
Third, we need to consider who owns the property in question. In the case of BF, we’re talking about almost exclusively private property that is either owned by the store itself or owned by a real estate firm that is renting the property to the store. In the case of OWS, there are varying degrees of public ownership, ranging from a public-private hybrid model like in New York City’s case to fully public elsewhere. This matters because property rights still matter. The owner in the private property case gets to decide whether or not to allow camp-outs (assuming legal compliance, of course). When the owner is the public, the government has an obligation to ensure that the property remains accessible to the entire public, not just a small portion of it.
Fourth, consider the lawless elements of each. BF had some ugly incidents this year, such as the woman who maced a crowd to gain an advantage, a couple robbery/shooting incidents, other criminal actions, injuries, and even a couple deaths. And these were all in one day. OWS has also had some ugly incidents over its 2+ months nationwide, including some vandalism, drug overdoses, sexual assaults (enough to necessitate woman-only tents in some camps), and gunshot incidents. It’s my opinion that OWS has on the whole out-uglied BF (if that’s a word).
I have no way of guessing exactly how many BF arrests occurred, but it’s unfathomable to me that BF would have more than the nearly 5,000 arrests OWS has racked up in its 2+ months nationwide according to @OccupyArrests. I doubt BF had even 500 arrests on the day nationwide (for perspective, 700 were arrested trying to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge). Even if we, for the sake of argument, make the highly remote assumption BF had as many arrests in one day as OWS had in 2+ months, OWS is still worse in this regard because we established above that the BF crowd is 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than OWS.
One last side note. OWS tried, and apparently failed, to disrupt BF. I’d be curious to see if the OWS disruption efforts resulted in an uptick in arrests. It’s a very hard question to answer because we have to have historical data on BF arrests and we need to be able to separate OWS-related and regular BF arrests. It’s not something I’ve seen any research done on, but it is a curiosity.
Size, duration, location, and lawlessness make it really hard to compare OWS and BF in any meaningful fashion. It’s a laughable comparison if you think even slightly about it. Don’t let yourself fall for that logic trap.
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