So… here’s the thing about that. Obviously, I feel bad for the loss of life—it was senseless. However, whenever you get a frenzied group of people together, there is always a dangerous situation. We hear about this every year at the Running of the Brides, Black Friday, or any other frenzy (when X team wins the World Series, if Obama’d lost, some places because he won). Frenzied humans are dangerous. We already know, from psychology, that the more people there are in a place, NO MATTER HOW OBVIOUSLY YOU ARE HURT, the less likely they are to help you (and it maxes at 6, even if you are stabbed in front of them, if there are 6 people around you basically won’t get help unless a miracle occurs). Especially with so many people, you get that mob mentality.
So I don’t see this more as a Black Friday tragedy, so much as either a bystander intervention in an emergency tragedy or the logical conclusion of a group of frenzied people. The person who tries to stop their frenzy gets the brunt of it. It’s horrible, but people as a mass are horrible.
And there is basically no way this guy didn’t know what he was getting into—there are deaths or serious injuries from Black Friday almost every year. Frenzied people = bad times. Always. Even if he hadn’t ever heard the news, his co-workers would have been talking about it days before. Despite not getting hazard pay, the atmosphere in the days leading up would have let him know it was sucktastic day to be at work and that injury was entirely possible. Add that to having him on the doors? Probable.
I feel for him and his family. But I don’t blame this on consumerism at all.
And you can argue that the consumerism is what worked the people into the frenzy outside, but I have a number of arguments: 1. stores create these sales to encourage that kind of frenzy at any cost, 2. if our psychology were different, if we were better able to identify an emergency and that our intervention was necessary then he would have been saved. I think the psychological factor is more relevant than the “but the stores created the frenzy” factor. Because the stores put all they can into creating that frenzy.