condiments

Crazed French Shoppers Riot Over Discounted Nutella

Photo: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images

Every culture has the consumer good they’re willing to fight over in public. In America, we’ll stampede our countrymen over slashed prices on laptops, Xboxes, and gift cards.

And in France, apparently, all it takes for grocery stores to devolve into mayhem is 70 percent discounts on jars of Nutella, according to the New York Post.

On Thursday, devotees of the milk-chocolatey hazelnut spread reportedly broke into riots when word got out that the beloved condiment was on sale at French supermarkets. (The French are the second biggest consumers of Nutella — Germans are the first — and the French apparently consume 100 million jars a year.)

In the northern French town of Ostricourt, police were dispatched to handle fights. In the Loire Valley, a store’s entire stock disappeared in minutes and a customer ended up with a black eye. And in southern France, shoppers threw themselves on a worker carrying Nutella, according to reports.

“They are like animals,” a customer at the Rive-de-Gier supermarket in central France told Le Progrès newspaper. “A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand. It was horrible.”

Crazed French Shoppers Riot Over Discounted Nutella