It did seem silly to me to wait so late to buy their groceries, especially since you can DIE on Purge night, and it would be better to safely hole up inside your home much earlier. This is a lot different than Halloween night where someone knocks on your door for candy, that's for sure.
But another way to look at it is: we happen to be following 2-3 main characters who end up being the victims (bad luck!), and we witness how badly their day goes on Purge night. Maybe there really aren't that many Purge murders in proportion to how many people are in the city (maybe there's only a few hundred nation-wide murders out of hundreds of millions of people?). We just happen to be catching the most horrific, dramatic storylines in this city. Most others are just at home watching TV like it's a regular weekday. If that's the case, and there really aren't that many Purge murders and crimes, then most ppl would probably treat Purge Night with less urgency than one would expect. Many citizens are probably thinking "It will likely happen to someone else but not me."
Like an unavoidable car accident or a robbery, the possibility is always there, but statistically-speaking, people still feel the odds of those things happening to them are extremely low.
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