Word: marts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...death of a Wal-Mart security guard in New York on Black Friday has Americans lamenting the human condition. The shoppers at the Valley Stream store have been called "rabid," "pathetic" "savages" with "no souls." There have been calls for criminal prosecutions against these "animals." Wal-Mart, meanwhile, has claimed it prepared for the crush by bringing on outside security and additional sales staff. "Despite all of our precautions," said Wal-Mart executive Hank Mullany in a thrillingly passive turn of phrase, "this unfortunate event occurred...
...could you know something like that would happen?" one worker told the New York Times. "No one expected something like that." But for people who study crowd crushes, there was nothing surprising about what happened at Wal-Mart. It was reminiscent of many tragedies that have come before, at soccer stadiums, concerts and Ikea stores, which only makes it more awful. "We know exactly how crowds work," says G. Keith Still, a crowd management expert who has helped plan high-density events around the world, including the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. There is, he says...
...Mart •fatal overeagerness of Black Friday shoppers...
Jdimytai Damour was just doing his job. Like the rest of his co-workers at the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y, he signed up for an early morning shift on Black Friday—the “official” first shopping day of the holiday season. But when shoppers forced their way through the doors at 5:00 a.m., Damour was thrown back onto the linoleum tiles and trampled by customers eager to snatch the best bargains they could find. He suffered fatal injuries crushed beneath a chaotic stampede of more than...
...conversation—but it is also a striking real-life indication of how far consumer culture has gone astray. As Joe Priester, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, suggested, we may attribute the homicidal mania of the Wal-Mart shoppers in question to “a sort of fear and panic of not having enough.” How far are we willing to let this acquisitive lust take us? Damour’s death is emblematic of the invisible price tag of the consumerism in which we so readily...