Haven't seen a diary up on this yet, so I want to make sure DK readers appreciate the magnitude of the actions right now shutting down Black Friday sales locations nation-wide (sometimes in conjunction with living-wage protests, mostly it seems independent). My friend @coffee_punk has an excellent twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/...
One would of course have expected this locally (at least if one lives here and understands the mood), and locally it's been big. The closest major shopping center to Ferguson and STL in general is the Galleria, which has been shut down for the past two hours. There's also been action at the Walmart 5 min from my house and the Target 10 min away. The next largest mall is West County, also shut down (protesters have left but the police still have it sealed off, no doubt to the bafflement of would-be shoppers). Interestingly I've heard nothing yet about Plaza Frontenac, the extremely-upscale mall in the center of STL county and the only one curently open in the region--but twitter-feed sez another mall is going to be targeted next, so we'll see. Best photos I've seen so far are 1) national guard deployed to protect our Right to Shop, and 2) shoppers stepping over prone 'dead' protesters in the mall to try to continue their shopping...
But as with all this week, the protests are not just local. Looks like major shut-down protests at Westgate and Pacific Place malls in Seattle, and (as another diary reported) BART is shut down completely---that seemed to have been protestor-initiated but it may also be a protest-control measure, since Oakland is pretty mobilized. I'd be interested in commentary from anyone on the ground in SF. Or Seattle, or anywhere else.
The big boxes, they are not so happy today.
4:18 PM PT: I should add: Walmart shutdowns in Chicago, Phoenix, L.A. And protesters just shut down Wilshire & Rodeo intersection in Beverly Hills. That one's gotta sting. I would note too that police responses have varied widely city-to-city, but not necessarily how you might expect. Some serious brutality in the Emerald City, for instance.
5:26 PM PT: and in the department of Can't Make this Sh*t up: