(msnbc) — Lori Cunningham, 42, still remembers vividly that fateful Black Friday a few years ago when she lost a bit of her dignity.  She arrived at a closeout retail store called Tuesday Morning in Los Angeles at 6 a.m. and it was so crowded she ended up crawling under a throng of people trying to get to a heavily discounted reproduction of a Thomas Kinkade painting.  Her target was a Paris scene priced at $190, down from $350, but a fellow female shopper grabbed it just as she got to it. “We did a tug-o-war,” she recalled.

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