Someone has to say it it

In defense of the pitiable bastards in the Wal-Mart Black Friday sale who trampled the poor man who was working as a maintenance worker from a temp agency. My two cents, originally written as a comment at EotAW.

I’ll defend the shoppers. And not just because, as it happens, I *did* go shopping on Friday, so there.

Here’s what I think. You guys know how crowds work. So the setup, as I’ve heard it described, is that the guy who was killed is hired security, and his job is to keep back a *crowd* of people who are trying to push through glass doors, yes?

Okay, look. The people at the front–the ones who actually pushed down the doors and, horribly, the security guard–are being pushed from behind by a crowd that can’t see what’s up ahead. Crowds will do this. And if the crowd is big enough, and trying to push through a small enough opening, and there’s a sense of urgency–like, oh, say, there are a limited number of loss leader items available and it’s first come first served–then it is very likely that the force of the crowd *as* crowd is going to overcome the individual strength of any one person.

You know how hard it is to work your way backwards through a crowd. Now imagine a crowd that’s *urgently* trying to push forward–it would be impossible. And, given that the crowd was apparently strong enough, en masse, to push down a door and trample a man, then (presumably) any individual–or even several individuals–who tried to push back–to keep the doors from being pushed open, or to keep the man from being trampled–is also going to be overwhelmed and pushed forward.

This kind of thing happens every year on Black Friday–if not someone being killed, then people being hurt, certainly. And yeah, if you stand back from it it’s easy to say that it’s awful (and it is), but I think you have to take into account the psychology of crowds as well as the simple physics of having a lot of bodies in one place all trying to go somewhere at the same time. Someone(s) should have stopped–I can’t imagine what it would have been like actually stepping on the poor man!–but you guys know about bystander psychology, and how people won’t step in if no one else does. Presumably everyone was thinking “oh poor guy, but if I stop I’ll get stomped too and I *really* want that Wii for my kid” and thinking that the man wasn’t *being killed* but had merely fallen and was going to get up again soon–that someone else would help him. It’s the same reason that people drive past a broken down car on the freeway, or walk past sleeping homeless people (who, for all we know, might actually be dying).

The real problem isn’t the people in the crowd. It’s the policy of creating such crowds, especially in situations without infrastructure and trained security people to manage the crowds properly. I mean, shit, set up some freaking ropes and create a damn *line*, or hand out rain checks, or have the damn sale run all day or all weekend long. Why the fuck are temp agency maintenance workers put in front of doors behind which are huge crowds of people who've been waiting all freaking night for the store to open?

The problem is the corporations who deliberately create an unnecessary sense of urgency and scarcity in order to drum up sales. The cops are apparently looking at video tapes in order to charge individuals in the crowd. Who the hell is going to charge the decision-makers at Wal-Mart? Or indeed, any of the other stores that pull this kind of stunt where, every year, people get hurt?