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Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death by Customers
By JACK HEALY Published: November 28, 2008
A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after being trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a frenzy.
I’m American, but I’ve lived in the UK for over a decade now. Every year around this time, I find myself explaining ‘Black Friday’ to at least one person. I’ve been kind in the past and explained it’s the day in the year that at the end, most stores will know if they will finish in the black or the red and that many have huge sales to encourage spending. I’ve tried to not focus on the greed and the start to the ‘Christmas Spirit’ that sees normally decent people turned into raving lunatics fighting over whatever stuff has been included in the sale.
But reading that a store employee can be trampled to death by shoppers really makes me cringe. It’s nuts enough to be queued up before 6am the day after a holiday in the cold to save a few bucks, but to start pushing and shoving to the point that the doors get pushed through and someone gets trampled?
I hope, but doubt, that this will be an eye opener to people who head out to the sales. Was that guy’s life worth the $20 saved on an xBox?
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Keeping with the Thanksgiving theme, I’m encouraging everyone to get involved with Tweetsgiving. Mostly aimed at Twitterers, it is a social networking celebration of the things we are thankful for and also a fundraiser to raise $10k to build a classroom in Tanzania and prove the power of social networking by raising the money in only 48 hours.
Please check out the site and get involved! Those who read and those who write - we need to keep proving our vast presence to those who think it’s a waste of time or for entertainment purposes only. I think we can raise more than $10k!
In 2008, I am thankful for the new friends I have made this year who keep me young.
In honour of Thanksgiving tomorrow, I’ll start with a picture of a wild turkey I took last year when visiting my folks in the Black Hills in South Dakota.
Yes, I do live in England, but every year I drag my husband (and sometimes extended family and friends) through the gutbusting tradition of giving thanks. It may even carry more meaning here as the British don’t have the same association with eating till you can’t stand up or discover you’ve got food poisoning and watching football or a parade or both and they actually put a bit of bemused thought into coming up with something to be thankful for.
