Thanksgiving wasn’t even over yet when shoppers looking for Christmas bargains began gathering outside the Green Acres Mall Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., said Robert McFadden in The New York Times. The crowd grew all night, swelling to more than 2,000 just before the store’s scheduled 5 a.m. opening. Then the restless throng started pushing against the sliding glass double doors with their shoulders and pounding with their fists. “Suddenly, the doors shattered and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush.” In their scramble for plasma TVs and PlayStations, customers knocked over 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour, a temporary Wal-Mart worker who was trying to keep the crowd in check. But the 6-foot-5, 270-pound Damour was simply no match for the frenzied shoppers who were trampling over him. He was pronounced dead about an hour later, killed by asphyxiation.
“Well, there’s your feel-good Christmas story of the season,” said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. Black Friday, the unofficial start of the holiday shopping spree, has been getting out of hand for years now, and I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone was killed. Still, what does it say about our species that presumably normal human beings can turn into a killer mob by the mere promise of 50 percent off some “toy or gizmo?” Have we sunk that low? Yes, apparently, said Al Norman in Huffingtonpost.com, but the shoppers are not the only “savages” here. Retailers have turned Black Friday into a dangerous free-for-all that exploits our worst impulses, to say nothing of our desperate need for bargains in these hard economic times. By allowing customers to congregate like mobs outside their stores, store managers deliberately whip them into a buying frenzy. “The crowd at Valley Stream was just following the program.”
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