As Black Friday dawned on Long Island, 2,000 shoppers waited in line outside a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York. The anticipation of low-priced flat screen televisions and children's games too much for them, they pushed and shoved their way past the locked doors before the store even opened. In the ensuing madness, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, a 34-year-old man, was trampled. As he lay on the ground, the bargain crazed shoppers stomped over him, and continued to shop even as the shocked Wal-Mart workers tried to get them to leave the store.
Is this what Christmas has come to be? Have the media and society in general turned us into such consumerists that we eschew any sense of human decency in order to save fifty dollars off a flat screen monitor? As someone on Twitter said: "Dear Jesus, We honor the memory of your miraculous birth by offering you this sacrifice, a 34-year-old temporary Wal-Mart employee. Amen"
This was a nicer version of my original reaction to the report of the work being trampled to death. I can be vindictive person when it comes to demanding that justice be done, but even I can't really find a way to really condemn this as a sign of some serious moral decline in and of itself.
As Dr. Helen brought up, there is a lot that Wal-Mart and other stores can do to prevent situations like this. They could start by changing the way that their doors are designed, so that unlocking and opening them can be done from inside the store, away from the incoming shoppers. Another option is to make the crowd line up and have armed security guards with handcuffs ready to detain any shoppers that are behaving in an unruly fashion and turn them over to the police. The police shouldn't mind, since such people can create a nastier, more complicated situation for them to deal with later if they are allowed to incite others into a panicked mob.
Now, with regard to the shoppers, it's uncertain how many of them should have reacted. The ones in the front would have probably suffered the same fate if they hadn't gone forward, and the ones in the middle were powerless to know what was doing on. Arguably, the only shoppers that should have been expected to stop, heed the instruction of the Wal-Mart employees and get out of the way were the ones toward the back who weren't being pushed forward by the shoppers behind them. It's all well and good to argue that the shoppers should have stopped, but it takes a stunning overestimation of human intelligence, independence and nature to believe that a mob of about 2,000 people will behave like something other than a herd of sheep without military training.
Another option would be to simply open the stores earlier but not put in the price change until 5AM like is done at the 24x7 stores. The 24hr walmarts never have this problem because people start lining up inside the stores at 2am and are already waiting at say the electronics and they all line up in a self enforced manner because someone who is waiting in line for hours is not about to allow someone in front of him, nor can a single person a stampede make.
The Targets in this area don't open their doors until 6 and it is a very different story there. There is quite a rush of people trying to get in, and the truly ugly side of humanity rears its ugly head, to include shoving pregnant women out of the way. Stores need to take a lesson from this and change the way they operate, if only for one day out of the year.
Well, you know me. I would post armed guards with M-16s with orders to shoot anyone who tries to create a mob situation if I were in the position to do so, but that wouldn't go over so well with a lot of people :)
I was listening to some more discussion on this on the radio today and it occurred to me that I was once in such a situation. I was in a passion play, and was playing the part of a centurion.
During on of the rehearsals I took a bathroom break and came back in, but in those couple minutes they had changed the scene, but I wasn't told of the change. In this particular scene myself and one other centurian were to hold back the crowd, but the crowd had moved. When I finally noticed the change, my partner was trying to hold them back when his spear broke it two and they rushed past. I ran over to stop them but when we contacted I might as well having been pushing a semi. Worse, they carried me back to a platform from which there was no escape for me.
Honestly, it was really scary. Against the combined force of a small group of people pushing on each other I truly was powerless. I could not have stopped them regardless of what I did. It isn't the fault of the people in the front of the mob. In fact, it cannot be pinned on any one person (unless, perhaps, there is an instigator) The problem is simply the crowd itself. Each person is going to do what they can to stay safe, and it isn't possible to stop a crowd, so just keep yourself from getting crushed (by applying the same force to the person in front of you as is getting applied to you by the people behind you) and just keep moving.
Still an issue of lack of crowd control. Just because you only have to deal with it once a year doesn't mean that you don't learn to deal with it. There are experts in this field, and Walmart should work hard at implementing these techniques for the next year so they don't see yet another death at their stores.