Long story short, woman with her baby goes to Walmart on Black Friday to pick up her baby meds, gets caught in the giant crush of shoppers and has a seizure. Employees rescue them and take her to front. They try to get her significant other to pick her up but since she has the only car and Uber isn’t taking any rides, two Wal-Mart employees volunteer to drive her home in her own car while a third Wal-Mart employee drives a second car behind them to take those two employees back home after, and also the employees paid for her medicine she originally came there to get.
I can see one employee doing it out of the kindness of their heart, but three separate employees all leaving work to help her out on Black Friday?
Did they still get paid? If so, that hardly seems like a problem. I’d be glad to get out of working retail on Black Friday!
To me, the question of liability poses greater challenges. I mean, woman has a seizure in your store, possibly brought about in part by your failed crowd-control, and you drive her home? What if she dies later that night, even from an unrelated condition? What if an employee gets into an accident with the woman’s car and the woman in it?
I’ve seen volunteer and paid staff take someone home from the hospital, on occasion. The corporation doesn’t encourage it, but I’ve known mid-level managers to be aware of it and not try to stop them.
Why did two employees need to ride with the woman in her car? They only needed one person to drive it. If the woman was bad enough she needed a non-driver to be there with her to monitor her condition, she should have been brought to a hospital.
The Walmart employees around here would step over your prone body and go out back for a smoke. Nah. Don’t believe it happened at all. Unless they were a relative or something.
A pregnant single mother with baby collapses in a big supermarket…
Supervisor sees the incident on CCTV and qualified first-aider is summoned; meanwhile, concerned citizens are calming the baby and (probably) filming the incident with their phones - after dialling 999 for an ambulance of course.
At least one, possibly two DCAs (double-crewed ambulances) turn up within five minutes, check the woman over and wheel her out of the store in a chair.
In the ambulance, they stick heart monitor pads all over her and plug her into the machine, while one of the crew looks after the baby.
They want to take her to hospital, but she says she is fine (she doesn’t want to spend the next two or three hours waiting around in A&E, only to be pronounced okay and sent on her way) so the ambulance drops her the baby and her shopping off at home.
The staff in the store who were involved, spend the next hour filling in reports.
This, fer sure! Any manager or supervisor would have a heart attack on the spot and need an ambulance himself if he saw this happen, for exactly this reason.
Here’s a detail of the OP’s story that is most implausible, or maybe just stupid: This shopper has a seizure in the store, and they took her home? :dubious: They should certainly have taken her to a hospital, if they had taken her anywhere at all. And even that wouldn’t be prudent. Someone having a seizure needs to get an ambulance called, with EMT’s who can monitor her condition en route and maybe provide some on-the-spot medical assistance as needed.
I can imagine OP’s story may have happened, but it sure wasn’t prudent. I’m surprised to read that the managers themselves did this. Nice of them to pay for her meds, though.
BTW, one of the tales (among several) about why Black Friday is called Black Friday has to do with the number of emergencies of various sorts that tended to happen because of all the crowds and traffic on that day, coined by police and emergency workers and Philadelphia. (Didn’t we just have a thread about this recently?)
It was Black Friday. I think they were ready to jump on any chance of getting away from the store! “You two are leaving to go take that lady home??? Shotgun!”
Would you all believe this story more if it was Nordstrom’s or Macy’s? I suspect more of you would believe it. I mean, I know Walmart is supposed to be Satan and all the employees are either half-wits or assholes, but really, this has not been my experience with Walmart, and I have shopped there extensively in three different states.
Neither more nor less. I’d still see “liability” as the number one stumbling block in a manager’s mind—a not insurmountable obstacle. Provided it overcame that, I don’t see what would keep it from happening anywhere. An added factor that might make it more plausible is if an employee didn’t pay for the woman’s stuff out of pocket, but rather if management approved something like “comping” (not sure what the term would be in retail) her meager purchases on the grounds of expediency.
If it was a small town Walmart, and everybody pretty much knows everybody, and they know where she lives because the manager’s daughter is friends with the seizing woman’s sister’s son, and they know she’s not going to sue, sure it could happen.
Sure, Wal-Mart is evil, but I don’t think you’ll find many Dopers shopping at Nordstrom’s or praising Macy’s. I think the typical popular store for a Doper would be like a Dollar Store, but not one of the name brand big-box stores. It has to be a mom and pop dollar store that also sells hard to find books. In the hygiene aisle is crystal deodorant, vinegar, and twelve varieties of Patchouli Oil.
I once had a woman cut her finger on a soda can she had dropped something into and was trying to retrieve. She was an adult, but was carrying on about her injury, which seemed minimal to my untrained eyes. Someone offered her a band-aid, but she was screaming that it needed stitches. I told her there was a hospital about a 15 minute drive away, but she countered that she couldn’t drive. I offered to let her use our landline to call someone, she said her husband was out of town.
All this was going on at the end of my day as I prepared to go home. My employees had another 90 minutes on the clock, and I (privately) told them that nobody should offer to drive her, as I was concerned about liability. I said they could call an ambulance if it came to that.
I do not know what ended up happening. I left and never heard what happened.
I find it hard to fathom why they didn’t call 911 for an ambulance. I would think that a chain like Walmart would have a set in stone policy for such things.
