Archive for December 4th, 2008
Wal-Mart Black Friday Death Preventable
A lot went wrong at the Long Island Wal-Mart last Friday. Thirtyfour-year-old Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death by aggressive shoppers, most of which continued shopping even after they were notified of his death.
This tragedy says a lot about the horrible motivations of the shoppers, but Wal-Mart deserves blame for Damour’s death. The shoppers didn’t need to kill anyone, but Wal-Mart created an unsafe environment by sparking so much unnecessary competition among shoppers. No, I am not at all justifying the customers’ behavior, and I think it’s really pathetic and disgusting of these people to put so much energy into shopping, however, the man’s life could have been spared if Wal-Mart hadn’t pushed for hostility among consumers. By offering just ten flat-screen televisions at an extremely low rate, Wal-Mart basically asked people to revert back to their primitive states.
Most civilized people wouldn’t contribute to such an unnecessary death, especially to shop, but without generalizing too much, the people that wake up at 3:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving just to shop don’t have their priorities straight, so it’s not completely surprising that they would stomp an employee to death to beat the rest of the crowd.
The shoppers are responsible for being inhumane, but Wal-Mart and other capitalists enable such behavior by advertising and offering only a handful of great deals that lead customers to instinctively turn on each other to meet their own end.
At the end of the day, no one should be shopping if they are on such a tight budget that they have to kill someone to save money.
