Shopping Shame: Consumption Chaos

I was hoping this was a hoax, but it appears to be for real. Over 2,000 shoppers, some on line for over 24 hours, stormed a WalMart opening on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving that marks the start of the holiday retail season and one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Incredibly, when notified of the tragedy and asked to leave the store, some shoppers complained that they needed/deserved to keep shopping because of their time in line! Such insensitivity is competely out of line with the very nature of the holiday that purportedly drives this consumer behavior in the first place. "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men," indeed!

This tragedy can only be taken as further evidence of a national loss of all sense of propriety and values when it comes to consumers and shopping. While it remains an isolated incident, it is nevertheless indicative of a system gone horribly awry. And WalMart bears responsibility for not having better crowd control measures in place. While some may argue that such tragedy could not have been avoided, it can only be seen as criminally negligent that corporate management and local supervisors allowed their employees to be in such a position of jeopardy, having created the conditions for chaos in the first place. Without their policy of focusing shopper interest on bargains and limited supplies on an early morning opening, the crowds would not have assembled in the first place.

What will WalMart management do now to address this? Will there be a repeat next year?

UPDATE: 11/30
Apparently, others feel this way. Here is a thoughtful treatment of the whole issue of crowd deaths in Death by Shopping.

In the next few days, I expect to hear that some people involved in yesterday's tragedy in New York were swept along by the crowd and were helpless to stop. It is possible that the glass doors reported to have been broken by over-eager shoppers were actually broken by the force of the crowd, not deliberately. We may see.

I am not exonerating people in the deadly shopping crowd. If police are able to identity individuals whose behavior escalated the danger, by all means they should answer to the law. But the forces that created the crowd were not limited to the crowd, and blaming individuals in the crowd misses several larger points.

A number of commenters are blaming the disaster on greed. Greed as a force for evil is something we Buddhists can appreciate. Greed, along with anger and ignorance, is one of the Three Poisons that fuel the passions that confound and trouble us. So, yes, there is greed behind the pushing and shoving to get the best seat or the best electronic doo-dad for a Christmas present.

Our consumerist culture encourages our desires, however. Rarely are we told there is anything wrong with pushing and shoving to get what we want. There was also greed behind a business decision to encourage "door buster" shopping without hiring enough security or factoring in crowd control.