CHARLESTON - Eastern Illinois University professor Linda Simpson knows how naughty or nice Black Friday shoppers can be.

For the last five years, Simpson and her colleagues Kathleen O'Rourke, Lisa Taylor, Katie Shaw, Deborah Reifsteck and Jill Bowers in Eastern's School of Family and Consumer Sciences have worked with many student observers to record shopper behavior ranging from the chaotic rush through the store doors long before dawn to those trading paint moments with shopping carts in the checkout lines.

"One of the interesting things we've found is when the day starts there is excitement and socialization among the shoppers. But as the day goes on they become aggressive, mainly in the checkout lines," Simpson said.

Fortunately, most of this research has concentrated on retailers large and small in the Midwest, ranging from towns as a small as Mattoon and Tuscola to huge cities like Chicago and St. Louis. That means the aggression has not become too physical between the shoppers as in other regions of the country, Simpson said.

"We've heard of some shoppers getting hurt in some areas of the country. But we're not seeing that in the Midwest. The most aggression our observers recorded with shoppers was irritation with employees if they were not well-trained. There was some cart bumping and some cursing in the checkout lines, too."

Crossing the line of tolerance for any Black Friday shopper is when they believe another shopper is cutting ahead in line, whether before the store opens, in the checkout or for coupon handouts.

"People cutting in line is not acceptable based on our research," Simpson said.

But those lines are not full of strangers. Observers, whether college undergraduates or graduate students, have recorded some bonding between the shoppers, especially when they are waiting outside for the countdown for stores to open for Black Friday - or late on Thanksgiving night in some cases.

"They will be talking about their families and getting very friendly," Simpson said.

Then chaos takes over when the store doors open, producing some research narratives that read like the plot line for a Looney Tunes cartoon.

"The most common behavior the observers recorded for customers was walking hurriedly, running, yelling and grabbing as many products as they could," Simpson said.

The majority of the reports at that moment was "total chaos."

Individual shoppers can tend to go wild, grabbing products from different aisles, while teams of shoppers, relatives or neighbors, are price checking before filling the cart, Simpson said.

Black Friday stories from her students in a consumer education class inspired Simpson to start this research project. It started in 2006 and will now concentrate on Black Friday shopping rituals.

Simpson and her colleagues have gained national attention with the research, including a recent article in The Washington Post. The hope is their research might help make Black Friday more customer friendly in the future.

"I guess we've made the big time," she said with a laugh.

She will avoid being trampled by any press horde in the future.

Contact Meeker at hmeeker@jg-tc.com or 238-6869.