Our generation seems to be fascinated with the idea of being apart of the latest trends. We want the latest fashions, the latest gadgets. We want to do the cool things that everyone else is doing. Most of these things are pretty harmless, such as wearing leggings as pants, getting our hands on the latest iPhones, and planking…everywhere. But it seems that more recently, a few of the trends that have been going around have gone a little too far.

This past month, two trends have popped almost literally out of nowhere. The Harlem Shake sprang up and went viral in one day. For the next week, this was all anyone heard about. But, while it got annoying quickly, it was harmless. It was just a bunch of people dancing ridiculously. Then a few days after the Harlem Shake came and went, gallon smashing came into the picture. The object of gallon smashing was to carry a gallon or two of milk around a store then purposely fall over, throwing the milk into the air and letting them crash to the ground and explode over the aisle. To people around, it would just look like you slipped and fell and were unfortunate enough to have dropped the milk.

Admittedly, the first video of this was funny. It was just three kids in a store being dumb and scaring the unexpecting shoppers when a gallon of milk exploded behind them, then watching the reactions when they think the kid has fallen. Then soon, more videos started appearing, each becoming worse and more dramatic. It soon became a big enough thing where teenagers in our town started doing it themselves, and this is where the trend got out of hand.

What people in town failed to realize was that gallon smashing wasn’t just a harmless trend like so many others have been. When you go gallon smashing, you’re putting others at risk and hurting the store. When two gallons explode all over the floor, someone is bound to really fall. While you purposely fell and are left unhurt, you have the rest of the people in the store who could slip and fall, hurting themselves. Then on top of that, you’re hurting the store by breaking their merchandise, which the store then has to pay for. Milk isn’t cheap, as prices have gone through the roof in the past few years, and repeatedly breaking open gallon after gallon is bad for the stores that have to pay for it.

It has now come to the point where a teenager can’t walk through the local Walmart with a gallon of milk without being looked at suspiciously and avoided by every adult around. What started with three boys pulling pranks in their hometown in Virginia has now reached the point to where teenagers around the country are under watch.

At what point can one trend go to far? It just takes one low quality, poorly shot video to start an epidemic. Be careful what you get yourself into, because while some trends are harmless, some are dangerous, and could hurt others, or yourself.