Reply #242: The more I read of this, the less I think Wal-Mart could've handled it

[silverojo]

From the article:

Before police shut down the store, eager shoppers streamed past emergency crews as they worked furiously to save the store clerk's life.

"They were working on him, but you could see he was dead, said Halcyon Alexander, 29. "People were still coming through."

Only a few stopped.

"They're savages," said shopper Kimberly Cribbs, 27. "It's sad. It's terrible."

The crowds are to blame...period.

The only thing Wal-Mart could've done differently would have been to call 911 and get riot police out there. No way could and store's security handle thugs like that, who literally broke the doors off their hinges.

This isn't a Wal-Mart problem. It's a "Black Friday" problem. As long as stores have Black Friday sales which attract hordes of shoppers, incidents like this will occur.

Sane people skip Black Friday altogether. It's a day when animalistic people gleefully come out of their cages to do battle with the masses, in order to get sale merchandise before the stores are sold out.

Stopping Black Friday sales and stocking adequate amounts of merchandise would be the answer. Maybe Black Friday doesn't result in frequent deaths, but there ARE numerous injuries that don't make the news.

The whole concept of Black Friday sales fuels this already sick mentality of people who will LITERALLY stomp someone to death, to snag an electronic thingamajig before they're all gone.

If you want to blame Wal-Mart for having sales like this, I'm with you. But only on the condition that you blame ALL the stores who participate in this "tradition" year after year.