Game Stooge

Walmart Employee Killed [UPDATE]

• Scribbled on November 29th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Editorial Content, Industry News, Off Topic

You saw the video of people fighting over Xbox 360’s posted earlier today – well, it’s nothing compared to the horrific scene at a Long Island Walmart yesterday at 5AM, in which 2000 people at 5AM successfully pushed down the doors in a shopping frenzy and stampeded a 34 year old employee and caused a 8 months pregnant woman to suffer a miscarriage. The pregnant woman did not miscarry, thankfully.

In a scene one might have experienced only in Left 4 Dead:

Chanting “push the doors in,” the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.

Sensing catastrophe, nervous employees formed a human chain inside the entrance to slow down the mass of shoppers.

It didn’t work.

Of course, the priorities of these dunderheads were severely skewed, to say the least:

Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like “savages.”

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since Friday morning!’” Cribbs said. “They kept shopping.”

Charming.

However, before you blame the shoppers, one must take a cold eye at megachain Walmart itself. It has a lot to blame for not protecting its non-union employees.

Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unionization of its employees. New York State’s largest grocery union, Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, called the death of Mr. Damour “avoidable” and demanded investigations.

“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.” (NY Times)

The store was finally cleared, the glass was swept, and doors reopened at 1pm to a considerably more sedate crowd. But a young man is dead and a mother lost her 3rd trimester child. Was it worth it? The shoppers may be directly to blame, but Walmart created the unsafe situation – it was a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe this will force Walmart to allow its employees to unionize.

But still – the shoppers are told that someone was killed by their hands and their reaction is how unfair it is to them? That they believed that they could hamper EMS and continue to trample the downed employee? Where’s the priorities? Especially in a recession.

What do you think? Let us know.

[UPDATE: The crowd became unruly after the police inexplicably left their surveillance of the crowd:

The chaos that led to a rampaging mob storming a Long Island Wal-Mart - and trampling a worker to death - erupted just after a pair of police cruisers pulled from the parking lot, witnesses said yesterday.

"Once they left, it started getting rowdy," said Jason Ortiz, 32, who came from East Flatbush in Brooklyn to get an early jump on post-Thanksgiving Day shopping. "The crowd got restless."

Question is - why did they leave? Did they think the situation was under control?]