PHOTOS: The British Are Fighting And Getting Arrested Over Black Friday Sales
On Friday morning, as retail outlets opened their doors at 8am, the police had already been called to more than 10 supermarkets across the country.
In Manchester, officers had to make two arrests as shoppers competed to bag the best bargains.
Here's a group of police officers try to restore order as shoppers panic:
People can be seen flooding into shops, arguing over TV purchases, and pushing past queues to grab discounts.
Some people are prepared to wait for hours and fight each other to get their hands on cheap offers:
And look at these videos of utter madness:
At an ASDA store in Wembley, London, images even surfaced of a shopper who had been "knocked to the ground". And at a Tesco in Lee Valley, north London, seven police cars and two ambulances were called after scuffles broke out on Thursday night. The Guardian says the store had to close because of the commotion.
The BBC's Zoe Conway tweeted this photo from the melee at ASDA in Wembley:
A video on YouTube, posted by DeanCoombesAnfield, even captures two women fighting over underwear:
The queues for Black Friday deals started in the early hours of Friday morning. Although it was first introduced by Amazon and ASDA in 2010, this year it's proving more popular and has been taken on by more companies.
The frantic buying is due to many UK retailers offering astounding deals. Sainsbury's, which is taking part for the first time, has got massive reductions and Tesco has cut prices by up to 70%.
Online, a host of retailers started selling on Thursday night, which led to a lot of websites experiencing unmanageable volumes of traffic and crashing.
Here's the Curry's website before midnight:
And here's the Tesco site on Friday morning:
We'll update this post throughout the day.