I don’t blame Christmas innately, but the way Christmas has been co-opted and turned into nothing but a massive consumer event in the US. It’s been reduced to nothing but pressure to buy buy buy.
Conversely, I hope WalMart get the pass on this one.
For a crowd that size pushing that hard, you probably could have lined up half a dozen cops 20 feet inside the door , guns drawn, and the cops would have ended up killing a dozen shoppers before joining the employees at the bottom of the pile. Once the surge starts, the people in front have nowhere to go but forward.
As someone who has worked around crowds, this firmly falls into WM’s responsibility. In my amusement park days we had a huge easter egg hunt that turned into a giant shitstorm when something like 300 parents charged in to “help” their 3-5 year old children. Fights and basket stealing commenced. TV news was already there to cover the event. Dozens of clips of crying children and crushed easter baskets were all over the news that night.
It took us about 30 min to sort it all out and get enough cops there to deal with all the people we cuffed for fighting. We pulled the plug on the whole event after that. The next year, we made it clear there would be zero parental involvement and any parent that crossed the barricades into the hunt area would be removed from the park, period. Two people were removed on the second round. Not another problem after that.
Just checking: You are taking into account the fact that the guy who died was an employee, right? That he had no choice about being there if he wanted to put food on his table?
For those outside the U.S. who may be wondering about the origins of this event, a brief history:
As “everyone” knows, commercialism dominates the U.S. celebration of Christmas. This is not a new phenomenon and extends back well over 60 years (where it plays a central role in the 1947 movie, Miracle on 34th Street and is documented in such phenomena as the Peanuts cartoon strip where, through the 1950s, the strip often featured characters talking about there being so many shopping days until Christmas. (In the 1950s, most retail outlets still closed on Sunday, so they counted down each week as a six day period during which one could shop.)
One tradition that grew up in the 20th century was the four day holiday at Thanksgiving. Unlike Christmas or Independence Day that can be celebrated on any day of the week, Thanksgiving has long been celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Over the years, employees agitated to have the day after Thanksgiving be a day off from work so that it would be easier to use four days to travel and visit family. Once the day after Thanksgiving was more or less universally a day off work for most people, the merchants capitalized on that fact to promote sales and encourage people to spend their day of leisure getting their Christmas shopping out of the way several weeks before Christmas.
That day became a really big shopping day throughout the country and has come to be known as Black Friday because so many merchants operate at a loss (in the red) throughout much of the year while the sales on that day are enough to make many of them profitable (in the black) just on that day’s business.
Beginning about 20 years ago, and getting ridiculously crazy in the last few years, stores began trying to lure business from their competition by offering extreme discounts only to customers who shopped in the first few hours of business at their stores. As more stores ran early morning sales, they also began to open the stores several hours prior to their normal business hours (with even more extreme discounts) to get the jump on their competition. In recent years, the trend has gone to absurd lengths with stores being mobbed by people who believe that they are going to be able to buy all their Christmas presents at some incredibly low price, (or purchase some rare toy or gadget which the merchants may have in short supply), if they simply show up early enough in the morning–often waiting outside the stores for hours before opening so as to be the first ones into the stores.
The incident in the OP was the result of a mob of people shoving into the store the moment it opened.
(And, as noted, it was not really any worse or more stupid than the various trampellings that Yanks hear about occurring at soccer/futbol games through the years in the rest of the world.)
I think this may be Brain Glutton’s Chuckles the Clown moment. I don’t share his zany sense of humor, but I’m not prepared to annihilate him either.
for those here who were not encultured with Mary Tyler Moore, I give you:
chucklestheclown with special attention to the “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode.
Without even reading through the responses, I’ll wager the same dingdongs who always say “so much for global warming” after an unseasonably cool day will join this thread to say ‘Heh heh! So much for the alleged liberal “recession”.’
I’ll further wager that I am related to some of them by blood or marriage.
Right, but how many people have posted “HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW!!!”
in large font, complete with “stick out tongue” smilies, as a response to those incidents?
Well, my statement was intended to pre-empt the typical non-Yank tongue clucking at the American culture, not to defend individuals within the American culture who display a striking resemblance to Equus asinus in their public persona.
As TomnDebb notes, this has been a “tradition” for awhile now, but…only recently has it become the aggressive, inhuman, greedy disaster that it is now.
I can recall even in the 1970’s and 1980’s that people were FAR more civil to one another during this time of year than they are now.
Now we have a ream of self-absorbed, cellphone-talking, SUV-driving zombies that are only looking out for #1, the consequences bedamned.
I realize that’s a generalization…there are plenty of nice people out there still that abhor this kind of behavior, but there’s no doubt that it’s on the rise, to our collective detriment as a society.
I just saw a Christmas ad for Walmart: “save money; live better.”
They need to change that one…
The sad thing is we all know the solution:
A Festivus for the rest of us!
I dunno, does “save money, live better, don’t push” really work?
Who said it was only Wal-Mart’s fault, or only the shoppers’ fault? EVERYONE played a part in the tragedy. Wal-Mart SHOULD have been adequately prepared-and they weren’t. The crowd SHOULD have been more human-and it wasn’t. Pretty much everyone was to blame-except for those who were caught up in the stampede-and forced to move along, or be crushed with the poor man.
You DO realize that this kind of thing has happened throughout history? It’s a damned wonder that only one man was killed, and one woman was hospitalized. Many times, it’s because of inadequate security, or what have you.
BrainGlutton, it’s a rare day when someone here can sink lower than Carol Stream. Congratulations, you fucking tool.
Is it really that new? It used to be a standard joke that otherwise well-mannered housewives would turn into an aggressive and violent mob whenever there was a big sale at the department store. That dates back to the 1950s, if not earlier.
Cite? 
No real cite, but The Simpsons made a joke about fifteen years ago about hurricanes being named after women because their destructive path looks like a department store after women have mobbed it.
Then Marge sighs and quietly mumbles “It’s true… but he shouldn’t say it.”
I have a hard time believing that. I suppose “otherwise well-mannered housewives…turning into an aggressive and violent mob…” in the 1950’s may have resorted to a little “fuck you bitch” and some pushiness. but not to the level we have today. Your cites are welcome to dispel my ignorance, though.
My impression is that average middle-class people were FAR more polite and well-behaved than they are today, on every level.
When I hear my parents talk about “the golden years” or whatever, what I take from that mostly is a time when the general populace at large in America had a tendency to look out for one another’s children, and that vulgarity was a surprising event, not the norm we have now.
Perhaps that’s just me. I’m not talking about sailors and longeshoremen, either. Just everyday working joes and their families, and how they were raised as opposed to today. Families with a stronger nucleus than we have today are what I wax nostalgic about.
I found a great one.
Note the date, April 25, 1909.
I stand corrected. Amazing.
At least the lines didn’t form until 7:00am, withthe store opening at 8:00.
See? They were more reasonable rioters back in the day!
I still want to see what the “tearing off of bonnets and waists” really looks like