Brawl At California Apple Store

There was a brawl outside a Pasadena Apple store yesterday after a man refused to pay dozens of homeless people the $40 he'd promised each of them for waiting in line for the new iPhone.

Two people were already arrested for fighting in the long line outside the Pasadena store before dozens of people hired from a nearby homeless shelter attacked a man who refused to pay them for their hours-long wait, cops said. “He was cheating us,” Calvin Windell Pleasant told the Los Angeles Times. The destitute group said they were driven to the Colorado Blvd. store by vans from a Los Angeles shelter, where a man promised $40 each for them to wait in line for the coveted smartphones. But when the doors opened, the businessman only managed to buy a handful of phones before the store ordered him out and deemed the rest of his vouchers useless. And when he refused to pay the rest of the 70 to 80 people he hired to stand in the line, the furious group pounced.

Police removed the man for his own safety. Some commenters on news sites are criticizing him for exploiting the homeless. The fracas was, of course, recorded by many other patrons still waiting in the line.