Something is Very Wrong with Black Friday

At his Business Ethics Blog Chris MacDonald has written about the trampling to death of a Wal-Mart employee. The 34-year-old employee was knocked down by a crowd that broke down the doors of the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y., and surged into the store. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 6 a.m.

Chris wrote, "Police are apparently investigating. That's good; charges should be laid, and I hope the tramplers go to jail for this (it's going to be hard to apportion responsibility among various members of the mob, but that's a problem for a different kind of blog). But from a business ethics point of view, it's clear that Wal-Mart also has to take action, here.

The 2005 attack-documentary, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" claimed that Wal-Mart's lax security was responsible for crimes committed in Wal-Mart parking lots. In my review of that movie, I suggested that was unfair. But today's death happened inside a Wal-Mart store, and was presumably incited by the sale Wal-Mart was having. I'm not saying Wal-Mart was responsible — the death was the mob's fault, and it's not at all clear that Wal-Mart could have foreseen that their low prices would cause a frenzied crowd to rip the front doors of their hinges and trample an employee. But now it has happened. And it cannot happen again. Wal-Mart has either to improve security measures during future big sales events, or cancel such events altogether.