Hmmm ............... I agree that Walmart should take steps at their stores for crowd management. However, I do not see this as an accident or as being their fault. Do they hold some responsibility, yes, they do and I think you explained that well. Further, this man died because of deliberat actions of other shoppers, period. IMO, we can paint and repaint the picture as many times as we wish, but, that fact remains.
I have been involved with using national celebrities for promotional gigs. Even after doing it for many years and taking many steps for crowd management I have learned this, if the crowd turns unruly people get hurt, they will hurdle management rails, kick ropes over and so on. Further, a handful of security personal can only do so much.
My personal conclusion, should Walmart have taken extra steps? Yes. Who is to blame directly for the death? The people who were unruly. Will Walmart be sued and have to pay? Yes. The simple fact is, those harmed in any fashion will go after the deepest pockets and no doubt, at least I hope this will inspire Walmart and other retailers to take steps to help ease the situations.
We as a society hold the blame. We have no common respect for each other, we are selfish, rude and place monetary objects above common decency and common sense. It is a sad reflection on us as humans, not Walmart as a business.
I can sort of agree with you there. There are a lot of rude people in America and it wasn't that way when I was growing up. I blame it on all the immigrants coming here en mass and not acclimating themselves to our way of life. We went through 3 years of heck, and to my shame, we had to go to the foodbank. I was surprised that there were so few Americans there. I was even more surprised at the rudeness and selfishness of the immigrants. They would take ALL the bread of a certain type, not leaving any for anyone else. Watermelons came in and they rushed the crate, surrounding it and passing off watermelons to their fellow immigrants, Americans didn't get ANY, granted there were only two or three of us, but we didn't get any. When crates of oranges came in, the only reason my family got any was because one of the people that works there, set aside some for us as she knew us personally.
I watched as one immigrant took two pastries and the guy behind the counter told her "one". She looked at him and said, "one?" he said "ONE". So she took one more and put it in her basket, they did nothing to stop her.
Yes, I blame the foodbank for a lot of this behavior as they let the immigrants get away with it, but me, I was taught to take turns, leave enough for others, etc.
My father in law goes to the foodbank on occasion. He was upset one time because there was an immigrant in front of him and there was an immigrant behind the counter. The immigrant behind the counter gave a steak to the immigrant in front of him, when he got there he said "I'll take one of those". They pretended not to know what he was talking about. He got no meat.
If you look at those pictures of the stampede at Walmart, you'll see most of those people have something in common and everyone is afraid to mention it for fear of being called "racist". The truth is that these people didn't grow up with the same manners as Americans of European decent. Call it a racist thing, but I don't think you'd get the same behavior with a crowd of white Americans. I do, however, believe you'd get the same behavior with a crowd of white Russians. <shoot, now I want a drink>
The crowd does hold some blame for the incident, but again, as this isn't the first time this has happened, Walmart holds a majority of the blame. Perhaps it's time to stop Black Friday sales all together? Or just make sure they can't offer supper buys on limited numbers of products. No more of this "only 30 per store" crap.