Black Friday: arrests and violence as shoppers clamour for discounts Other reports told of pregnant women being shoved aside as chaos descended at the store in west Belfast, while pensioners and people with disabilities were seen being trampled under foot in the scrum. The cause of the mad rush was Black Friday, an America concept that sees stores slash their prices on the first Friday after Thanksgiving - a moment treated as the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season. In recent years the phenomenon has increasingly been adopted by UK retailers looking to get ahead of competitors by offering cheap prices for items expected to be the year's big stocking fillers. John Lewis, Amazon and Very.co.uk all offered discounts to shoppers under the Black Friday tag-line this year but it was Asda - a subsidiary of US retail chain Walmart - which saw the most heated flare-ups over its bargains. Margaret Green, 55, who went to Asda in Benton, Newcastle, looking for a Black Friday bargain described what happened soon after the doors opened at 8am. It was bedlam, chaos. It was absolutely jam-packed. ... People grabbed what they could. There was no ticketing system. The queue just fell apart," she said There were big fights at the tablets and the phones. It was horrific. It was like a pack of savages looking for a bargain. I was ashamed to be English to be honest. Discussing the discounts across UK stores, an Asda spokeswoman said: "This is the first time Black Friday has been done on this scale in stores across the UK and our customers were eager to take advantage of the great offers available to them. Throughout the event, the safety of our customers is of vital importance and to ensure our stores can cope with the extra footfall we have full security teams in our stores and extra colleagues to help assist customers in the aisles.