Buy Nothing Day

[Ed W]

Really.  If there were ever a reason to deliberately turn our backs on the Black Friday celebration of grasping materialism, it's this:

Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Should we attribute this to boorish/criminal behavior?  Simple personal greed or corporate greed?  How about the depersonalization of strangers?  

Undoubtedly there's plenty of blame to go around.  The mob mentality is exacerbated by the business policies of deep discounts, and as the story unfolds, we'll probably find there were some in the crowd who initiated the action.  But there's so much money involved that I expect little will be done to prevent incidents like this from happening again.

The worrisome part is that this death is newsworthy at the moment, just as stories about employees "going postal" were once shocking. Now, they're too common to be front page news, being relegated to the inner pages somewhere.  In five or six years, will we be as equally accepting of more employee tramplings?

[rwarn17588]

Oh, please.

When you have millions upon millions of people Christmas shopping on one big day, something bad is bound to happen just from the sheer odds.

I'm no fan of materialism. But the above rant is pure hyperbole.

Hell, by that reasoning, you should cancel the Route 66 Marathon just because one guy croaked.

[sauerkraut]

People will just do the shopping another day. The shop keepers will get the money one day or another day.

[Rico]

quote:Originally posted by rwarn17588

Oh, please.

When you have millions upon millions of people Christmas shopping on one big day, something bad is bound to happen just from the sheer odds.

I'm no fan of materialism. But the above rant is pure hyperbole.

Hell, by that reasoning, you should cancel the Route 66 Marathon just because one guy croaked.