Sophie Haywood bedded down alone outside Primark, under a thin blanket on a deserted Oxford Street one night last spring. Five hours later, as the sun crept across the pavement, she woke to find herself surrounded by thousands of people. In front of her, the new glass doors of the flagship London store groaned on their hinges. Behind her, the crowd kept pushing. “I suddenly realised that I was right in the middle of all these people who were even more desperate than I was to get in,” remembers Haywood, a 26-year-old Primark devotee who had queued since 3am.

By 9am, with an hour to go until the shop opened, Haywood was struggling to keep her feet on the ground as the pressure of the crowd carried her forward.

“The shop had to open 15 minutes early because the doors were about to give in,” she says. “When they finally opened, it was like being caught in a crashing wave. You're completely powerless. I remember falling face first into the shop and then scrambling on my hands and knees to try to get to one side. It was terrifying - and all I wanted was a cheap pair of jeans.”

In the past few years, the shopper stampede has become an accepted part of the annual British shopping diary, with retailers such as H&M regularly struggling to maintain order at their designer collaboration launches.

In 2005, five people ended up in hospital after the opening of an Ikea store in Edmonton, North London, descended into chaos. And since her first collection in 2007, Kate Moss's clothes ranges for Topshop have, at times, caused pandemonium.

But Britain may be just one stampede away from a tragedy of the kind that struck 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour in America on Black Friday last week, a day when stores traditionally slash their prices to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Unlocking the doors of a Long Island, New York, Wal-Mart superstore at 5am, Damour was trampled to death by customers charging towards the cut-price vacuum cleaners.

The incident has sparked lamentations of a broken consumer society and collective cultural bankruptcy. An article in The New York Times pointed the finger squarely at the retailers and the media, which had offered consumers “shopping strategies” and “Black Friday blueprints”.

John Naish, the British author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More, disagrees. “It was us who did that,” he says of the Wal-Mart accident. “It was not the shops.

“Although our conscious brain knows that we have got everything we need to survive, our primitive brains are primed to believe that we live in a world of scarcity and starvation and death is always around the corner.

“When something's on sale it feels scarce. When you see a lot of people queuing outside a shop, your primitive brain thinks it must be for something really vital.” Naish sees the shopper stampede as an innate fasting response, built into us from our earliest days when our ancestors had to fight for their share of food or die, and exacerbated by the financial turmoil.

“Now we are just queueing to get a dress that's 20 per cent off,” Naish says. “But inside your head, there's still this roiling panic going on.”

Despite our hard-wired idiosyncrasies, however, it is easy to blame the shops, the behemoths with their screaming red sale signs, their slick marketing and their hype. Who are we to resist? And why wouldn't any company trying to turn a profit in increasingly harsh economic times go out of their way to make sure we cannot.

“We absolutely encourage the queues,” a spokeswoman for H&M says. “But I disagree that it is irresponsible.” Undeterred by the hysterical scenes in 2004 when it introduced its first collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld, the chain has continued to court the crowds with high profile and strictly limited ranges by Stella McCartney, Kylie Minogue and Robert Cavalli.

A YouTube video of the bedlam at the launch of the most recent collaboration with Comme des Garçons has had tens of thousands of views. “We are always aware that we're going to have a lot more people and we put on extra security,” the spokeswoman insists. “We also launch the ranges in stores throughout the country rather than just one.”

The Primark stampede was “too much”, a Primark spokeswoman says. “Nobody would want that to happen again.” But, she admits, the sales figures from that fateful day in 2007 were astronomical.

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