Shopping/Leisure Behemoth Opens, Bloodbath Ensues
‘Alexa’, the new necrophile zombie shopping crypt on Alexanderplatz, opened to shocking scenes of chaos on the 12th September. Europe’s largest branch of MediaMarkt opened at midnight, and thousands of Berliners decended upon the store in a fest of consumer greed. The “stack ‘em high, sell them low” policy of the electronic goods giant hyperboled: bruised faces, police in riot gear barking orders and a semi-destroyed escallator was the result.
Here’s the news channel N24 with some footage:
October 5th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
It is curious how crowd scenes like this , with their mixture of claustrophobia, tension, anticpation and fear, trigger personal memories. I understand that it is something to do with the stress hormones imprinting an image deep into the sub-conscious, which then re-surfaces in the context of similar experiences, even when viewed via the web. My own memory is of myself as a small boy, waiting for hours (it seemed) in a crush outside a toyshop on the council estate round the corner from where I lived, in London. It was the closing-down sale, and I endured the discomfort to return home with a sooper-dooper Airfix kit as my prize. I can still visualise my mother saying in surprise and admiration as I told her of my ordeal when I returned: ‘You stayed there and got it!’