  The escape panic version of the Social Force Model (SFM) is a suitable model
for describing emergency evacuations. In this research, we analyze a real-life
video, recorded at the opening of a store during a Black Friday event, which
resembles an emergency evacuation (November 2017, South Africa). We measure the
flow of pedestrians entering the store and found a higher value ($\langle J
\rangle =6.7 \pm 0.8\,$p/s) than the usually reported in ``laboratory''
conditions. We performed numerical simulations to recreate this event. The
empirical measurements were compared against simulated evacuation curves
corresponding to different sets of parameters currently in use in the
literature. The results obtained suggest that the set of parameters
corresponding to calibrations from laboratory experiments (involving
pedestrians in which the safety of the participants is of major concern) or
situations where the physical contact is negligible, produce simulations in
which the agents evacuate faster than in the empirical scenario. To conclude
the paper, we optimize two parameters of the model: the friction coefficient
$k_t$ and the body force coefficient $k_n$. The best fit we found could
replicate the qualitative and quantitative behavior of the empirical evacuation
curve. We also found that many different combinations in the parameter space
can produce similar results in terms of the goodness of fit.
