Like many others, I’ve had a difficult time during this Thanksgiving weekend to get my mind around the tragic trampling of Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour. Did people keep shopping? Did the Valley Stream store make any sales before the police closed it down? Who put up the sign outside the store saying “Blitz Line Starts Here”?
The president of a union that has been trying to organize that Wal-Mart questioned the lack of adequate barriers and security precautions. But Wal-Mart’s low prices and its loss leaders might have been a but-for cause of the tragedy:
As part of its Black Friday promotion, Wal-Mart had advertised sales like a Polaroid 42-inch LCD HDTV for $598 . . .
The Wal-Mart online catalog lists what looks like the same product on clearance for $750. If Wal-Mart had advertised its regular $798 price for this TV, Jdimytai Damour might still be alive.
People started lining up at the Valley Stream store at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Some people were there because Black Friday has become a free-standing holiday tradition. There’s a certain esprit de corps to standing in line with your fellow shoppers. (I confess I do not share this feeling: Years ago when our first child was born, my beloved spouse took me to a 10 percent-off layette sale at a local store. The store was so mobbed and unpleasant that it hit me I’d prefer to go to a 10 percent-on sale to reduce the crushing throng and the cutthroat competition.) But other shoppers get out of bed early the day after Thanksgiving because of special early-bird prices. When we don’t ration scarce goods by price, Econ 101 says they will be rationed by having people queue.
To say that the low prices were a but-for cause of this man’s death is not to say that Wal-Mart should be legally or morally culpable for low prices. Indeed, there may be so many contributing causes to this tragedy that it is difficult to assign individual blame.
I’m particularly troubled by reports that police are thinking about charging individual members of the crowd. When people behind you start pushing you forward, there is often nothing you can do. And there’s a real fear that if you try to resist, you too will be trampled. Part of the tragedy is that there are undoubtedly people in that crowd who know they stepped on something that day, or who, in their excitement, spurred on the surge. These thoughts may haunt them for many years.
This is not an example of the wisdom of crowds.
This death and its multiple economic causes reminded me of the Bob Dylan song “Who Killed Davey Moore?” It’s about a boxer who died of injuries from a fight in 1963:
Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?“Not I,” says the referee,
“Don’t point your finger at me.
I could’ve stopped it in the eighth
An’ maybe kept him from his fate,
But the crowd would’ve booed, I’m sure,
At not gettin’ their money’s worth.
It’s too bad he had to go,
But there was a pressure on me too, you know.
It wasn’t me that made him fall.
No, you can’t blame me at all.”Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?“Not us,” says the angry crowd,
Whose screams filled the arena loud.
“It’s too bad he died that night
But we just like to see a fight.
We didn’t mean for him t’ meet his death,
We just meant to see some sweat,
There ain’t nothing wrong in that.
It wasn’t us that made him fall.
No, you can’t blame us at all.”Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?“Not me,” says his manager,
Puffing on a big cigar.
“It’s hard to say, it’s hard to tell,
I always thought that he was well.
It’s too bad for his wife an’ kids he’s dead,
But if he was sick, he should’ve said.
It wasn’t me that made him fall.
No, you can’t blame me at all.”Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?“Not me,” says the gambling man,
With his ticket stub still in his hand.
“It wasn’t me that knocked him down,
My hands never touched him none.
I didn’t commit no ugly sin,
Anyway, I put money on him to win.
It wasn’t me that made him fall.
No, you can’t blame me at all.”Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?“Not me,” says the boxing writer,
Pounding print on his old typewriter,
Sayin’, “Boxing ain’t to blame,
There’s just as much danger in a football game.”
Sayin’, “Fist fighting is here to stay,
It’s just the old American way.
It wasn’t me that made him fall.
No, you can’t blame me at all.”Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?“Not me,” says the man whose fists
Laid him low in a cloud of mist,
Who came here from Cuba’s door
Where boxing ain’t allowed no more.
“I hit him, yes, it’s true,
But that’s what I am paid to do.
Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say ‘kill.’
It was destiny, it was God’s will.”Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
“I’m particularly troubled by reports that police are thinking about charging individual members of the crowd. When people behind you start pushing you forward, there is often nothing you can do. And there’s a real fear that if you try to resist, you too will be trampled.”
Let’s hold that thought until we see what evidence the police have to support such charges.
In the situation you describe — a solid swarm of people being moved against their will — you’re right.
But after the initial crush, if there were individuals who ran freely over this poor gentleman with no regard for his safety simply to get at the bargains inside, then they should be held accountable.
The video you posted says that shoppers were even jostling the first responders trying to aid the man — this clearly must happened at least minutes after the initial rush for the door.
Are there any security videos of this event, and if so, what do they show?
The problem was with the company, not the people in line. Best Buy has been doing this for years. They distribute numbers many hours before the store opens to people in line. This prevents the entire crush. Walmart bases it on just the line itself. That gives people incentive to cut in line, push, and all the like.
It is amazing what a simple thing like handing out numbers can do to modify human behaviour. They have been doing this for years at my deli!
I guess Wal-Mart crowd management people didn’t study or don’t remember the Cinicinnati Who concert in 1979.
As a guy who’s done industrial safety in varying degrees since 1990 I’d say the store management is ultimately to blame.
I’m more interested in what OSHA has to say then the police.
IMO store management should have know from past experience what to expect and planned accordingly. That’s what management it about, ya know?
I was recently at Walt Disney World and the way they handle the opening rush to the main attractions is something Wal-Mart and other retailers may want to look at for next year.
Either that or dump this “Black Friday” crap forever.
Two circulars that I saw, Toys R Us and Game Stop, specifically advertised “Door Buster” specials. I think that one of the factors is that stores often add the clause “Quantity limited and no rain checks,” so people are thinking to themselves that if they aren’t one of the first people into the store then they are not getting the good deals. My wife chose a calmer, depending on how you look at it, Black Friday 6:00 a.m. scene, Loehmann’s.
Sympathy for the Devil: I shouted out / who killed the Kennedys / when after all / it was you and me.
First, I think it’s a pretty cheap maneuver for unions to use this man’s death to attack Wal-Mart. We all know the unions don’t like Wal-Mart; this death doesn’t change that, even if the unions are feigning a new kind of moral outrage over it.
Second, lots of people are saying that this death was “caused” by Wal-Mart, or by rampant greed, or unthinking consumerism, or whatever boogeyman s/he wants to complain about. Again, though, the same principle is in play … this death does not change the fact that the critics already do not like whoever or whatever it is they think “killed” Damour, so we’re hearing nothing new from them. Damour’s death might ratchet up their sanctimony, but sanctimoniousness is usually not helpful.
Truth is, no one person or thing killed him. It took a number of participants — some willing, some inadvertent, some completely unwilling — to kill him. Rather than choosing a particular boogeyman and blaming him/her/it for Damour’s death, a better approach would be to see who had the most direct role in this disaster.
And that would be — of course! — whoever it was in the crowd who pushed to get in. That’s so obvious, it doesn’t need to be said. Secondarily, Wal-Mart personnel at this store failed to provide any direction to the throng or security, thus creating a scenario in which some pushers near the back of the crowd could cause this to happen. Simple crowd-control measures, such as putting up barriers or arranging people in lines rather than in a single mass of humanity, might have prevented the “cascade effect” that brought the stampede about.
Are Wal-Mart’s deals, or consumerism generally, to blame? No, because Wal-Mart has been selling things cheap for decades, and no one ever died over those deals before. People living even in our intensively consumerist society CAN in fact shop for cheap stuff without killing each other … as evidenced by the fact that this is the first time in “Black Friday” history that a stampede has claimed a life.
There should be a criminal investigation into this. The people in the front-ranks who were shoved through the doors by people further back are not to blame, as Prof Ayers points out, but I doubt an investigation would stop just with them. It will be difficult enough for police to find recognizable faces on camera footage in their quest for “leads” to follow up on; so they will, no doubt, talk to as many as they can, in the process. How this crowd gathered, and how the store’s management dealt with it prior to the store’s front doors being opened, will also no doubt be reviewed — as it should be.
The more salient message from this tragedy, though, is that “Black Friday” has definitely gotten out of hand, unnecessarily so, since it is NOT — as is so often presumed, by people in and out of retail — the “busiest” shopping day of the year, and the ONE day that stores can make a lot of money. (Here’s why I say that.)
The myth of “Black Friday” is persistent and appealing, because it’s the result of “magic-bullet” thinking … i.e. the (often) false belief that to any problem there is one “best” solution that must be pursued in preference to all else. Retailers believe that their business can be made or broken based on “Black Friday” sales, believing it to be “the” most important shopping day of the year … thus they offer huge sales and promote it heavily.
Retailers forget that the REAL “biggest shopping day of the year” is actually the last Saturday before Christmas, and that many of rest of the top-10 best shopping days of the year lie inside of the Thanksgiving/Christmas calendar window. Thus, “Black Friday” is NOT truly a “make or break” day for them; they have many more heavy shopping days coming up in the following weeks.
(Where did this myth come from? The Times’s own David Carr explains it very well in a great article that everyone should read.)
This makes this tragedy even worse than it already is. Damour was killed as an indirect consequence of retail’s false belief in the importance of “Black Friday” as the ONE DAY each year in which they MUST make AS MANY sales as possible, or fail. In this case, false belief and fallacious thinking led (by a long chain of events) to a man’s death. It needs to STOP, and it needs to stop NOW.
I’m just sickened by the entire thing. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart President & CEO should have gone on television and apologized for he in the end is responsible for not ensuring that such a thing could occur. I hope Scott is brought up on criminal charges by NY Attorney General Cuomo as well as subordinates on down the line that could have done something with proper planning. People need to be fired for doing this.
Moreover, Scott should go to the funeral and personally apologize to his parents and make very large financial amends.
Not everyone makes the money to have the luxury to go to 10% on-sales to avoid crowds. People wait in these long lines generally because the $100 to $150 savings means a great deal to them.
I am Jewish and have been following in particular the killings of people at the Chabad House from the Mombai terror and then I contrast totally different senseless killing.
American Capitalism at its best.
The problem was not the prices, it was with the people in line. When a crowd becomes a mob, terror ensues.
In accounts I read, there were police manning the crowds at that store in the evening, but they were called away to other “door buster” crowds that were deemed more menacing.
Those officers who were being trampled when trying to perform CPR should have drawn their weapons and fired some warning shots. Maybe teargas and water cannons?
The Spirit of the Season indeed.