It Happened Again: The Annual Black Friday Trampling (1 Viewer)

[Walter C]

This goes to show what Christmas is really about, and the expectation of giving gifts just because it's December. I don't really have a problem with gift-giving, but do have a problem with those labeling me a Scrooge when I decide to do the exact thing during another time of year. And honestly, I don't think much thought is put into the gifts.

After Christmas Day, retailers have to brace themselves for returns, which has me thinking "so much for the Christmas spirit". This and the idea of Christmas in July makes this holiday, a pathetic joke.

I agree with Mark, that those people who trampled the worker, should be held accountable.

 

[TravisR]

Unfortunately, no one. Like you said, you can't assign blame on any one person or section of the group but I wouldn't hold Wal Mart liable for what other people did either. I guess the best that I can hope for is that the people who did the pushing or shoving or any other action that caused the poor guy to die will have to live with the guilt of having helped cause the death of a human being.

 

[Patrick Sun]

It was just as crazy in the northwest:

Nation & World | Wal-Mart crowd unruly long before trampling | Seattle Times Newspaper

 

[MarkHastings]

After reading that story, my stance remains even more so. I believe that 100% of the responsibility lies with some (if not most) of the people in the crowd, without a shadow of a doubt.

Sure it may have been a dumb move to open the doors, but if they weren't opened, I bet an even uglier scene would have developed. In fact, I bet the doors still would have been broken down.

The only thing that would have stopped the crowd would have been a massive police deployment. Yet I still believe that if that were to happen, there'd still be mass panic and destruction and instead of suing Wal-Mart, there'd be a law suit filed against the police force....hell, there'd probably STILL be a law suit filed against Wal-Mart for not opening the doors or for causing the scene to get uglier by calling in (what I'm sure would be called) "excessive police force". :rolleyes

There's no doubt in my mind that a lot of the people in the crowd were just a bunch of no good savages and it's unfortunate that they are allowed to get away with this. It also sickens me to know that no matter what was done with the situation, someone would STILL be blaming everyone they could other than the ones (in the crowd) who acted the way they did. :frowning:

Absolutely disgusting!

 

[drobbins]

When there is an issue at my work with a few bad parts being made, we can usually focus on one individual and implement a corrective action. If the issue is bigger and spans a few shifts, yes we still find the individuals involved, but we have a saying - "A screw-up this big must have been a team effort". We first look at our own management and evaluate if there is anything different we could have done to prevent our employees from making mistakes. At this store this screw up sounds like a team effort involving the crowd, the store and even the police. It is funny because the more I read the story, the more I blame the store.

You get any random crowd of 700 or 2,000 people and you will have a certain % of jerks. You will get a % of good guys also. A certain % will obey common rules of decency and a % will take advantage of any chance they get to look out for only themselves with total disregard for anyone else. It sounds like the crowd was out of control 1.5 hours before the doors were opened. Did the store request any help from the police? One person was injured and the police were there. Did those officers notice that there was a 2,000 strong crowd out of control? No they left. The incident was definitely a team effort, but it was the highest ranking store manager's responsibility to look out for his workers and customers. It appears that his workers were afraid and yet still nothing was attempted to diffuse the situation. I guess that 2,000 people caught them off guard, but still the store created the situation. They created the hype, lack of sale items, lack of crowd control, they did nothing even after they knew the crowd was out of control, and they still chose to put their workers in front of a dangerous crowd. Yes there were jerks in the crowd, but ultimately the store should have planned ahead and is ultimately accountable. It will be interesting to see how this pans out as more fact surface.

Agreed!

 

[MarkHastings]

^^ So why not sue the manager on duty? Why go after the store?


I still say it's because you get more $$ if you sue Wal-Mart.

 

[drobbins]

Well... How profitable would it be to go after the guys in the crowd with out any money?

 

[Dave Mack]

Fully agree.

 

[Dave Mack]

Didn't they also move the worker up front because he was a big guy, thinking that would help? Did he have any training in this sort of thing? He was supposedly hired for "maintenance".
I rotate and work the stagedoors at 16 shubert theaters on B'way and have had to deal with crowds for among many others, Clay Aiken, Fantasia and most recently Daniel Radcliffe, (he has 500 or so people every night waiting to see him and get his autograph after the show Eqqus every night and they push on the barricades and it sometimes gets very hairy) There are very specific techniques that can help or hinder a crowd situation. There HAS to be a sense of order and there HAVE to be people dictating the situation. Whether that be through loudspeaker, bullhorn, whatever. One cop is not enough.

What also happens in these situation is that the majority get swept up and pushed along. If you try to stop, help, maybe turn around, you can be the next person to go down and be trampled. I'm not implying that there weren't sc*mbags involved. Clearly there were. But they didn't create the unsafe situation, they simply took advantage of it.

 

[DominoDeja]

That was so wrong.

I cried when I saw that...

 

[JonZ]

"A culture of acquisitiveness first and acquisition at all costs? Yes."

And when discussing Wall*E, people actually objected and seemed offended by the obsessive consumers themes of the film.

Id say they nailed it.


How is this any different than hitting someone with your car and not stopping? Anyone involved is guilty of manslaughter and anyone who didnt help or kept shopping is a failure as a human being.

This is why I just stay home around the holidays.


And yes, as we can see.......people are stupid. Always have been, always will be.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Let me use an illustration from the old Roman law of civil liability, a kind of thought experiment intended to illustrate some of the finer points of the law (this is to be found in the Sentences of Paul). Suppose that two children are playing ball ; the ball bounces off something & hits the arm of a barber who is shaving a man, causing the razor to slip & cut the customer's throat, killing him. The barber clearly isn't responsible for his customer's death, any more than he would have been if someone had come along & grabbed his arm. Since it was customary at Rome, as in many Italian villages down to this day, for most of life to take place out-of-doors, the barber wasn't negligent in agreeing to shave someone in the open air where such an accident could happen. The children, besides being minors & thus not legally responsible (in the original example, just to make things more interesting, the barber was a slave & thus also not legally responsible), probably had no idea where the ball was going to go, & thus are also innocent of the barber's customer's death. Now, in this case, the people who did the actual trampling are in the position of the barber, since they were being shoved from behind — there was literally nothing they could do except move forward, as though they had been so many stocks of wood. The people in the back of the crowd, who were doing the shoving, arguably had no idea what the consequences of that would be — each one individually was (presumably) applying only the sort of moderate, intermittent pressure one would expect to receive from the natural jostling in a large (perhaps somewhat agitated) crowd, pressure which would not have caused problems in the open, but which was multiplied & concentrated to lethal levels by the bottleneck at the store door. As far as the people in the crowd are concerned, therefore, there does not appear to have been anybody who performed any act (remembering that, legally, an act is a motion proceeding from within, rather than an involuntary one caused by an external force, a muscle spasm, or the like) which directly led to the death.

 

[MarkHastings]

^^ That's not a great example, because some of the people in the crowd were intent on doing whatever it took to get the deals. Sure they didn't intend on killing someone, but when you're that intent on getting something, you're bound to end up hurting someone.

 

[JonZ]

I agree thats a bad example as a slip of a blade at someones throat isnt the same as walking on or pushing someone.

The people in the back: People shouldnt be shoving other people. Period.

"The only thing that would have stopped the crowd would have been a massive police deployment. "

So thats what we've come to as human beings? After millions of years of evolution. We need police escorts to shop.

George Carlin once said we're only a minor step above primitive beasts.
I think this is just another example of how right he was.

 

[Dave Mack]

You know what's kinda shocking and ill advised? Today I saw on TV a commercial for ToysRUs "DOORBUSTER DEALS!" starting at 6am! coming up.
You have the retailer THEMSELVES calling this kind of situation a "doorbuster" and putting the time it starts prominently in the ad. Implying that to get the deal, you had better get there early.

And we wonder why this climate exists?

 

[MarkHastings]

^^ That still shouldn't be any excuse for people acting like savages!

Look, the whole point of stores advertising "Doorbuster Sales" is to get people excited about shopping. This is NOT an advertisement to act in an illegal or even irresponsible manner. Nowhere in those quotes does it say to break a door down and nor should anyone be allowed to do so and then blame the advertisement.

Those who can't control themselves because of some F***ING WORDS, need to be held accountable for any of their actions that aren't either sociably acceptable or lawfully acceptable! It should really be that simple.

 

[TravisR]

I love ya, Dave but I gotta disagree. Unless the ads starting saying "Push, shove, stab or shoot anyone in your way to get these deals", I don't see the problem with stores using silly marketing hyperbole. Barring a legitimate mental disorder, even the stupidest person knows that you aren't supposed to bust the door open or push people to get something on sale.

 

[MarkHastings]

All of this reminds me of the people who sue TV shows (like Jackass) because their kids emulate what they see on TV and now TV shows have to display stupid warnings before hand to cover themselves from law suits because no one ever wants to take responsibilities for their own actions.People just love passing the blame on to someone else. It's gotten so bad that we have to display warnings everywhere!!!

Not that I'm against these warnings, but what's being created is a sense that all of the responsibility falls on the store, business, or company, etc. because people are starting to expect these "Behavioral Warnings". It's like we don't know how to act appropriately without someone else telling us how to act.

We've all become brainless morons who need to be held by the hand and when we aren't being held by the hand, and something bad happens, we play dumb "Oh, there was no sign (or authority figure) telling me how to act, so it's not my fault. If there was a sign that said not to act that way, I wouldn't have" :rolleyes

You see, we live in a world where others are supposed to care for us and they are supposed to be in a constant state of telling and showing us how to act. Instead of blaming the bad actions of the individual, we immediately look to blame the ones who didn't try to stop the individual from his/her own bad actions.

And that my friends is sad comment on today's society.

 

[drobbins]

Warning labels have ruined the natural process of selection.

 

[KurtEP]

ChristopherDAC explains the issue pretty well here. Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where none of the solutions are really satisfatory.

From a public policy perspective, it's probably best to hold a large store liable. They have management who have experience seeing this thing unfold every year, and can (and should) take action to prevent it. They can bring in crowd control, design the doors better, change advertising, etc, and they can do it centrally, speading the cost out to many places. Policing the individual is much more difficult, costly, and less likely to succeed.

Also consider that if the store is liable, they'll pay some money, that is likely going to come out of insurance (who should also be doing their part to make sure this doesn't happen). If the individuals who were involved in something like this are charged, they're likely to face felony jail time, destroying their lives and potentially impacting many around them. All for the sake of finding someone to punish for something that is arguably an accident. Really, the biggest thing that's always bothered me about tort law and criminal law is that every injury needs to have some sort of punishment. We live in an imperfect world. Accidents happen. Punishing someone for an accident just adds another victim to the scenario. This of course excludes obvious negligence, etc...