Shopper Stampede: An Avoidable Tragedy

You may believe in the perfectability of human beings, but evidence of our imperfections were everywhere to be found this holiday season. From a Wal-Mart store in Long Island to the streets of Athens we saw humans acting in mobs and the images were not pretty. A stray bullet which killed a young teen set off days of rioting in Greece. The incident at Wal-Mart in on Long Island was much less serious but equally troubling. There, store operators lost control of a Christmas shopping line which did not wait for the official store opening. The crowd broke through the front doors, shattering the glass, rushing the greet staff, and trampling to death a Wal-Mart employee in a stampede rushing to advertised bargains.

In security work we are often more involved in the mundane tasks of monitoring, exposing, and countering individual misconduct and are less experienced in dealing with misconduct en masse. One would think, however, that large retail chains that are astute enough to whipping consumers into a buyer frenzy year after year would also train in-store or hired security forces for crowd control – at least on Black Friday, the wild American shopping spree that takes place each year after Thanksgiving day and is the kick-off event of the Christmas season.

There is very little Christmas spirit to the most profitable day of the year for retailers, but some chains seem to understand it and manage it well. We admire Best Buy most, although we depend principally on personal observation. Several times a year, Best Buy introduces a new computer game or electronic marvel – flat screen televisions seem to be the got-to-have item of year end 2008 – and store managers know that a promotion will draw a mob. First off, the body weight of the door staff at Best Buy probably exceeds that of the retiree greeters at Wal-Mart by a factor of two or three. (They appear to favor smart linemen from the local schools. But they are also more thoughtful in the care and management of the lines these special sale days create. They break the groups of crowds standing in line. They hand out numbers to dissuade the deadly sport of last-minute line jumping that local louts practice when a long line starts moving and everyone is distracted as entering a theatre or store – no number, no entry.

If your organization is one that only occasionally must deal with crowds, whether it is the Christmas pageant at a mega church or, perish the thought, at a bankruptcy sale, give some forethought to which team you deploy to manage the mob, and make sure you have trained and drilled them in ways that keep bad things from happening to good people. It will be up to the authorities in Long Island whether they choose to charge anyone with criminal activity in the rush that took the life of an innocent human being. But we would do better to keep in mind that most of those in the incident were good and law-abiding citizens who got up, as you and I might, in a sudden mob frenzy where your first thought is to save yourself from injury or possible death. We need help when we move in groups if we are to resist the dark corners of everyone’s human psyche.

- Tom Goff