Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers

[rowyn]

What bothers me most about this story is the section at the end. Where the police talk about pressing charges against Wal-Mart for not hiring more security, and Wal-Mart faults the police for not having more patrols out.

...

Shouldn't someone be blaming the people that actually trampled this poor man to death? The ones who tore the doors of the hinges? The ones who stomped on him, ignored him, didn't try to help him up, shoved the people in front of them so that they would have no choice but to rush forward heedlessly as well?

American need to learn how to queue. :(

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

All of (a), (b) and (c) are true.

The crowd was unusually violent or vigorous, since the reports of this sort of thing seems to have amounted to a total of one.

We have been immensely lucky, I think; this kind of thing happens (I am told) rather more frequently in Europe.

And Wal-Mart applied different procedures, in that they hired extra staff and security. As you suggest, they did not prove sufficient to the task at hand.

However, it's not clear to me that doubling the staff would have prevented the incident; we would not expect Wal-Mart employees or contract workers (which seems to be the case here) to defend the entry points of their closed store with deadly force.

The crowd seems to have resisted even police efforts to control them; police officers were said to have been "jostled" by the crowd when they arrived, and this is after a series of announcements trying to get control of the situation by informing the shoppers what had happened.

It seems to have been a bad situation.

===|==============/ Level Head