Wal-Mart: ‘Crowd Trampling’ Not an Occupational Hazard of Doorbuster Sales

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6208/walmart_says_crowd_trampling_not_an_occupational_hazard/

Thursday July 8 12:39 pm

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Thirty-four-year-old Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour died of asphyxiation after being trampled by hundreds of frantic shoppers who rushed the door of the outlet in Valley Stream, New York on Black Friday, 2008.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited WalMart for poor crowd control and imposed a paltry $7,000 fine. OSHA found that the store had not given its employees proper training and equipment to deal with crowds.

Since then, WalMart has spent over a million dollars fighting the fine.
The company's legal battle is costing taxpayers huge amounts of money and wasting the time of officials who could otherwise be protecting the public. OSHA told the New York Times that its legal department has already spent 4,725 hours on the case.

Why would the company go to such lengths to fight such a trivial penalty? The company has already adopted new crowd control guidelines and set up a fund to compensate victims of the Valley Stream stampede.

Wal-Mart is digging in its heels because it doesn't want the federal government to define crowd trampling as an occupational hazard that employers are responsible for mitigating.


FULL story at link.

Someone in the back of the line has to start to pushing people for this to happen. I understand the people in the middle and front of the crowd have no options, but someone in the back starts the pushing. Crowd trampling is embarrassingly stupid.

pushing, shoving, trampling and feeling some kind of euphoric need to buy something they can't afford just to impress someone who doesn't give a damn. While I blame Wal-Mart for setting it up I also blame these addicted shopping idiots.

Why do we allow a media and retailer to get into our head and control our emotions? There is a recent book written on the "consumerization" of America and which discussed what happened when we went from being considered "citizens" by business and government to being "consumers", and just how much it impacted our nation and psyche. It is a recent book. I'll have to search for it. It was discussed on C-SPAN.