by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
Yesterday was Black Friday, a national day of consumerism-gone-wild in which merchants try to get all of their accounts into the black through massive sales and hoopla. The intent is to get consumers pumped to a fever pitch so that they spend, spend, spend! The stores open at dawn, or earlier, and the waiting customers, some of whom have been standing in the cold for hours, come pushing and elbowing their way into the stores to grab up the bargains.
It is not surprising that these "sales" sometimes get physical as customers race for the limited amounts of drastically marked-down merchandise. This year, however, things went well beyond physical, and actually became deadly in a couple of well-known national outlets.
The Wal-Mart Store at Valley Stream, NY, was the scene of a death committed through mass hysteria, the snuffing out of a life that happened at the confluence of poor planning and classic American greed.
Wal-Mart was having a Black Friday sale - a dandy of sale! Shoppers who made it into the store when it opened at 5 a.m. could score a Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV for $798, a Bissell Compact Upright Vacuum for $28, a Samsung 10.2 megapixel digital camera for $69, and DVDs for as low as nine dollars each!
So many people had gathered outside of that Wal-Mart by 3 a.m. that the growing crush of early birds caused the store windows to begin buckling inward. Some accounts say that the police were called but never responded. By 5 a.m. when the store was due to open, over two thousand people were packed against the doors ready to erupt into the store and begin lunging for bargains.
The store door was opened promptly at 5 a.m. by Jdimytai Damour, a maintenance worker who was technically an employee of a temporary agency working for Wal-Mart. As the doors opened, their frames were pulled from the walls by the stampeding shoppers, and the unfortunate temporary employee was trampled to death by the rampaging horde.
That's right! A man was trampled to death by two thousand people desperate to get their hands on a twenty-eight dollar Bissell! Several other employees saw what was happening and tried to rescue their co-worker. They were kicked, shoved, and stepped on as they tried to get to him.
The police arrived and were trying to revive poor Mr. Damour - and shoppers continued rushing by the emergency scene in order to get to the bargains! Police eventually ordered the store closed, and were met by angry jeers like, "I've been in line since yesterday morning!" as the Wal-Mart shoppers continued grabbing merchandise.
Today police are going over the store's videotapes trying to identify the persons who actually stomped Mr. Damour into the floor. That will probably be a thankless task, because when one is packed into a herd he is at the mercy of everyone else. Certainly no single person intended to stomp a fellow human to death, but the herd ended the life of a minimum wage worker who was only doing his job.
Wal-Mart is also complicit in the death of their "temporary" employee. Anyone who has shopped at this monster-retailer knows that they routinely understaff their stores. They also weaken the effectiveness of their store staff by using part-time employees (to avoid paying benefits) and by using the employees of temporary agencies to provide an extra layer of protection to store management. (Then when the INS comes in late at night and arrests the illegal aliens who are cleaning their stores, management points to the agency that they have contracted for the services and says, in effect, we didn't hire the illegals - they did.)
Instead of trying to pin the slaughter of Mr. Damour on individual shoppers who were being propelled into the store by momentum of the rampaging herd, perhaps blame could be better assigned by interviewing company management in Bentonville to determine who made decisions to use an inadequate security and sales force to handle a risky situation created by company sales strategies.
What can be said about something like that? Have we finally seen the true fruition of American consumerism? Have we become such a nation of greed-heads that the death of a fellow human being is diminished to nothing more than a shopping obstacle? Do we measure our love for one another with sales receipts? Has a plasma TV become this generation's golden calf? Must we celebrate the birth of Jesus at the altar of the check-out counter?
Two additional deaths occurred at a Toys 'R Us in California. Two women began brawling in the store. As the fight escalated, their men pulled out pistols and killed one another. It was unclear today as to whether this deadly disagreement was due to a conflict over a bargain toy or the result of some personal matter that was carried in from the street. Be sure of this though, in a country as focused on personal weaponry and the "right" to pack heat as the United States, this California shootout is undoubtedly a harbinger of things to come.
Maybe next year on Black Friday retailers will offer drastic mark-downs on bulletproof vests!
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