If it had been my store, I would have thought the following:
"I know that black Friday is the craziest shopping day of the year, and my prices are low, so I should expect a very large turnout. What else should I be concerned about for tomorrow? Do I have enough staff? Do I have enough merchandise? What will happen if I don't have enough merchandise? People may get upset. People may fight over products. It has happened before. Come to think of it, my customers may be worried about getting the product they want and at a good price. There may be quite a crowd. What can I do about that? If I leave it, someone might get hurt. I'd better try to somehow get people to proceed in a calm fashion through my store. Single file lineups at the door might be a good place to start. It might even be a good idea to hire security. This is a potentially dangerous situation. I certainly don't want to put any of my staff in harm's way. etc."
Doesn't this seem like a reasonable line of thinking? If you think that this type of thought process is asking too much of a proprietor, then we will have to agree to disagree. What troubles me more than the issue of whether Walmart bears some of the responsibility for the trampling of their employee, is the suggestion you made that my belief that Walmart is partly responsible for this is comprable to believing that victims of muslim rape somehow had it coming. That is an inapt comparison, I think.
The comparison is not that applicable to your position, so don't worry..
It was more related to something muman had said, related to what walmart had done wrong.
Your first post didn't specify what Walmart had done wrong.
Muman mentioned
"also apply the mitzvah of placing a stumbling block before the blind, in which case Walmart would have transgressed this by advertising the DVD player for such a great price {a stumbling block for the poor}"
As if Walmart shouldn't have enticed them with low prices..
That's what inspired the parallel I gave, with blaming the woman for getting raped.
And I also had the impression that this was a stampede like the new orleans case, since I read that they were predominantly blacks. It seems that was wrong.. it's not like they were trying to harm the shop.. e.g. steal.
You are right.. big shops should have security.. lots of people coming in.
But, although your "thinking ahead" - which you do in retrospect! is good. I think their real experience shows what has happened, and this is also the experience of other stores. A stampede like this is , to a sale, is a first.
Some shops have revolving doors.. But accidents can happen with them too! It may be dangerous if many shoppers barge it. Should they remove the revolving door before a sale?
This was a freak accident, and involved some immoral customers.. It's too rare, too unknown an occurrence , to say there was negligence. This is a shop.. I'm sure most big stores when they have sales don't have sophisticated crowd control mechanisms to prevent these things. It's just not the kind of problem shops have faced before.
To be fair to security guards in shops.. Most are there to prevent theft.
I'm sure football stadiums, british ones at least, since they have a history of problems, the security would be organised from prior experience and connected to police from prior experience. So even them who do it competently, didn't figure it out by guesswork.. They figured it out from experience in their field.
It could have been almost any big shop. So in a situation like that, it's like something that is a mistake anybody could have made.. (though this one was a one-off freak occurrence). I wouldn't call it negligence, because it's not just one shop. You can blame all big shops. Walmart was the one in the wrong place at the wrong time!
After the fact though, now that a shop has experienced that, if it happened again there would be a stronger case of negligence.. particularly if it was the same shop!
Topic: I need a Hallacic opinion, please (Read 3971 times)