Angela Natividad's Live & Uncensored!

02 December 2008

Death by Bargain



Food for thought: so far, 24% of Adrants readers polled think WalMart should be held accountable for an employee that was trampled to death in its Long Island store on Black Friday.

WalMart's suffered Black Friday stampedes, and potential lawsuits, before, which naturally leads to questions about why it didn't make a better effort to organize crowds. (Consider the painfully orderly iPhone launch.) New York Times writer Peter Goodman even went so far as to call the event a "shopping Guernica." (Oh, to see Picasso paint that.)

And while crazed deal-seekers did Friday's trampling, some bloggers -- like Adam Frucci of Gizmodo -- agree WalMart is at least partly responsible:

Why was there no line set up? Why didn't they let in a reasonable amount of people at a time? What kind of method is it to just allow hundreds of people to cram up against the doors, waiting for them to open? They may have wanted some photo op of people surging through the doors, but they willfully created a very dangerous situation.


Other cyber-spectators, like commenter Scott Crouch on the Dallas News Opinion Blog, suggest maybe WalMart and the holiday stampeders be held responsible.

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