Well Yojimbo, since Circuit City usually opens at 10 am M-S and 11 am on SUnday I would say the early bird hours was a special circumstance here and sauntering up to the store as soon as it was being unlocked and crusing ahead of other folks waiting patiently, well that was just nervy you and your sister.
Though I do admire those gutsy illegal maneuvers and utilize them myself when cutting in line and stealing parking spaces on campus.
Y’know, I had to police kids in lunch lines for ten years, and one of my basic rules of thumb was, of course, no cutting.
That being said, if there IS no line at the door, then line-cutting is pretty much an impossibility. If the door is open, and the cooks are in there serving food, and there are not students in line, it is open season on that particular door.
It’s not rude to go in an open door, any more than it is rude to choose the shortest or quickest-moving line at the bank or grocery.
Why weren’t these people using the door? My only guess is that they didn’t realize it had just been unlocked, or they were waiting for something special like a discount flyer or something. (Or they were dumb, but that would be asking a lot of coincidence, wouldn’t it–all those dumb people in one spot?)
Venoma, no, you did not say all at once, but if there had been no line it would have been very likely that everyone would have rushed in at once, which can be very dangerous, and which also slows things down when people are bumping into eachother.
I do not think I need to explain it, but just so you know, if you have a 2L coke bottle filled with marbles with a diameter 1/3 that of the coke bottle’s opening (such that up to 5 can fit through at once), the time it takes for it to empty will not be the 1/5 the time it takes for the marbles to come out one at a time. Why? They block each other.
Think about that riot in England where IIRC almost a hundred people were crushed to death when too many people filled the stadium after the police opened the gates. Granted, most of those who died were those unlucky enough to be near the front, where they were crushed and/or suffocated from the people coming in from behind, but I bet there probably were injuries/deaths resulting from the initial rush too.
I have also been in places with large numbers of people. I imagine we all have. The difference in a HS dance, meeting, what have you, is that there is no immediate rush to get out/in. Now, if you put some Barry Manilow on in the middle of an HS dance nowadays, there would probably be many injuries from people trying to get out… ;).
They were going through the door, still in line.
accidentally hit submit
The only reason that yojimboguy and his sister had a clear path to that door was because the other people were being orderly. There’s no real difference between what he did and entering from the side of a single door opposite the line.
{BTW, I was once got to a warehouse sale before opening time. There was no line, just a stampede when the doors opened. I not only got knocked down, but also stepped on.)
I’m on the ‘no foul’ side. Even though I ordinarily despise line cutting, this just doesn’t seem to fit the bill. If there are three clearly available doors and there’s a line waiting to use a particular one of those doors, I would reason (justifiably I think) that those people were waiting for something special. Since I just want to go in the store – without waiting for whatever they seem to want – I’d feel free to go in.
I think there is some missing information here. The OP states that he arrived at the store pretty much right at 7 AM.
Having gone to some of these sales in the past (rather unwillingly, btw), the SOP is to ask customers who arrive prior to the opening of the store to form a line. At the opening time, the employee starts the moving through the door. It is possible that the OP arrived just at this time – the doors had been opened moments before, and the line people were about to start moving through the door. Had the OP arrived a few minutes earlier, the doors would have been closed. A few minutes later, the line wouldn’t have been there at all. If this was the case in this particular instance, then I think it is rude to bypass the line-waiters.
Yes, the employee (or, the store’s policy, if that’s what the employee was acting upon) is not helping matters, but I think that’s beside the point. I generally don’t wait for retail employees to instruct me on good public behavior.
I’m also sort of puzzled by people who assume any particular line isn’t for them. Don’t people ask what the line is for – “Is this line to buy tickets, or for ticket holders?” “Is this line to get in, or for the rebate offer?”
Yeah, sometimes that would be the case. But the OP was not looking for any particular thing (like rebate offers), they just wanted to get into the store. And since there was a door already open and clear, with no line in front of it, well, why would they ask what the other line was about? They just wanted to get into the store, and hey! There’s a door, right there, open and waiting for them to enter it! So they walk on through.
It would be different if there were two lines (at each door), or if the other door was closed, but that was not the case.
Let me see…exactly how does this inconvenience others? Because that’s the only reason line-jumping is wrong; it’s rude because you slow up everybody who has been patiently waiting. But, if you’re just using another entrance door to a store, then nobody is slowed down. All those people in line will still get in when they would have anyway.
Case in point: just today, there’s a line at the subway stop to use a token machine. Of course, there are two other machines right next to it. Now, people are waiting in line because the damn things are broken so often that they assume it’s the only other one. If, however, somebody walked up and used one of the other unused machines, how would that be rude?
Also, I would like to add that “you know it’s wrong because you wouldn’t be asking otherwise” is quite possibly the stupidest response to an honest question I’ve heard.
I don’t think the issue is whether it was an inconvenience to others. The whole point of being early at a sale is to get the good deals before they run out.
Yojimboguy, I’m on the “no foul” side as well. You were in the right place at the right time. It doesn’t sound like it was one of those deals where they let only a certain number of people in the store at a time or anything, so you would have been in the store with that group of people at the same time anyway.
Especially a Black Friday sale at a technology store.
These sales, FYI, have X number of items at special price (like the video card I got - 10/store, at about 55% off, or the sweet 1.5 GHz laptop for $650), and these items are the reason people are lining up early.
So, no, there was no inconveniencing of people in terms of hindering their entrance into the store, but there was potential for you to have sauntered in and buying up 10% of the available inventory of a highly coveted item. Since you don’t mention the incredible deal you got on a laptop, I’m guessing this didn’t happen, but it would have been very dirty pool in my book, if you had and did it on purpose.
It was rude.
I think some people aren’t quite understanding something here. As I underatand it, there was only one entrance, with two automatic doors covering it. Thus, there was an orderly line of people who had been waiting a while going in the single entrance, and the OP and his sister went in the empty space to one side of said entrance while the line went in the other side. They bypassed an existing line going in the same entrance they went in.
If this is correct, this was no doubt line jumping. Just because there is room to get past others who are in line and using the same entrance as you doesn’t justify it.
The problem here is whether one regards getting to the best deals as a competition with orderly rules, or a “whoever gets there first is the winner” situation.
How would you feel if friends of the employees and owners had arrived an hour earlier (unadvertised), and taken all the best deals? Pissed off and cheated, right?
The people who were standing in line understood the “rules” as: whoever wants to get a good deal the most will stand in line the longest. By cutting ahead in line, you broke the rules.
Sure, one can argue that there were multiple entrances, or that one didn’t understand what “standing in line” means, but . . . if I’m going to break a social convention, I’d rather do it out of moral conviction than pretending to be socially inadept.