Video of looting during George Floyd protests shared as visuals from Black Friday sales

By: Praveen Kumar
November 27 2023

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A 2020 video of looting at a Nike store from a George Floyd protest in Chicago has been shared with the narrative that it was from the recent 2023 Black Friday sales. (Source: X/Screenshots/Modified by Logically Facts)

What is the claim?

A video of people running out of a vandalized Nike store with merchandise has been shared on social media, claiming that people looted the store on Black Friday, November 24, 2023. Several users shared the video with captions like “Black Friday at the Nike store!!!” and “This Black Friday discount must have been amazing. Look at all these satisfied customers!”

X (formerly Twitter) posts sharing this video with similar claims have gained hundreds of thousands of views. The video has also been shared on TikTok. Archived posts can be found here, here, and here.

This video and claim have been shared on X with a massive engagement. (Source: X/Screenshots)

However, this old video shows an incident during a protest and is unrelated to the rush commonly seen during Black Friday sales.

What we found

A reverse search of screenshots from the viral video led us to an X post by the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Ben Pope from May 31, 2020. His X post shared the same video with the caption, “Nike store on Michigan Ave smashed and completely looted.” Another post by him in the same thread shared an image of the store in the aftermath of the looting and vandalism. Fox Business has used his X post sharing the video in its report.

Comparison of the viral video with the original video from 2020. (Source: X/Screenshots/Modified by Logically Facts)

Russian state-controlled news channel RT also shared the same video on X on May 30, 2020, with the caption, “Emptied in seconds | #Nike store smashed & completely looted in #Chicago.”

This looting happened during one of the protests in Chicago protesting the death of George Floyd, who died under a Minneapolis police officer’s custody, NBC Chicago reported on May 30, 2020. The report discussed and carried pictures of the incident's aftermath at the Nike store and added that similar looting happened in other stores, such as Zara, Nike, CVS, Walgreens, and Neiman Marcus. The report also carried a photo of the damaged Nike storefront in a May 30, 2020 report. We matched the image to the storefront in the viral video and found that both featured the same broken glass, the same board on the left side, and a matching storefront.

Comparison of the viral video with an image of the 2020 incident published by NBC Chicago. (Source: X/NBC Chicago/Screenshots/Modified by Logically Facts)

Real estate news outlet Costar News also carried a photo of the Nike store on Michigan Avenue vandalized in the protest, credited to Taylor Truman, in a report about the aftermath of the demonstrations dated June 1, 2020. The photo was captioned, “Workers in Chicago scrambled to board up stores, such as the Nike flagship on Michigan Avenue, which was looted after peaceful protests turned into mayhem over the weekend.” The boards on either side of this store match that in the viral video.

Photo of the same damaged Nike store in 2020 was included in the CoStar News article. (Source: CoStar News/Screenshot)

Chicago Tribune also reported the debris and shattered glass strewn across Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Dozens of downtown businesses were damaged because of unrest in response to Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. According to Reuters, Derek Chauvin, a white former Minneapolis police officer, was convicted of Floyd’s death. He knelt on the neck of a handcuffed Floyd for more than nine minutes in a murder caught on cellphone video. The video went viral and sparked numerous Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S.

There haven’t been any reports of looting at Nike stores during the Black Friday sales in 2023, nor anything similar to that seen in the viral video.

The verdict
A 2020 video of a looting at a Nike store during a Chicago protest in response to George Floyd’s death has been incorrectly shared with a narrative that it shows looting on Black Friday, 2023. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.