Walmart Touts Crowd Experts It Used To Develop Black Friday Plans

[RandySF]

If you’re looking for bad news on this Black Friday, you’re probably Googling “Walmart.” The massive discount retailer has been the scene of injuries, arrests, pepper-spraying and general pandemonium at locations across the country today.

Asked about the stories of fights over sale items and arrests, Walmart touted its pre-planning for the biggest shopping day of the year, though acknowledged the chain is “always learning” about how to deal with the crowds that pack its stores.

“I would just tell you that the plans we have in place were developed with nationally recognized crowd experts and really were the first of their kind,” company spokesperson Greg Rossiter told TPM Friday. “Having said that, we always look at the way we run our stores.”

Those plans Walmart used this year were drawn up following much darker incidents than the ones that have marred the day at some locations of the massive retailer. In 2008, a store employee was trampled to death as a crowd surged into a New York Walmart to snatch up deeply discounted merchandise in the ritual that kicks off the holiday shopping season. A lawyer for the family of the dead man chided Walmart for not providing the employee with crowd control experience.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/walmart_touts_crowd_experts_it_used_to_develop_bla.php?ref=fpa

[inademv]

1. Like the ones

that slammed that grandfather's face into the floor?

[Initech]

2. If we got paid more we wouldn't be fighting over cheap toys.

[customerserviceguy]

4. If retailers stopped playing the "sale" game

we might not have frenzied fools committing acts of unnecessary desperation to have Chinese-made toxic crap.

Six years ago, I got a job working for Sears, it was my job to come in at five in the morning to climb up a ladder and replace a "40% Off!" sign with a "50% Off!" sign, and then a few days later, replace the 40% sign. It quickly occurred to me that if they did away with the signs, the dead-tree advertising circulars, and yes, my job, they could sell the BS for 60% all the time. But they depend on enough of us to act like mindless idiots when we see that "S" word, and unfortunately, enough of our fellow human beings prove them right. Those who respond to the fake siren sound make me embarassed of my species.

Maybe pepper spray is too good for them.

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. I suppose this won't stop all the snarky responses

But there really are quite fascinating studies on crowd movement and prevention of crowd crush and similar events, and there really are people who study these things and know a whole lot more about crowd dynamics than all the people on this message board. So we can snark at the notion of "crowd experts," but crowds actually do behave in fairly predictable ways given various environmental and symbolic conditions, and there is, in fact, a hundred year scientific tradition (in sociology, in biology, in architecture and spatial planning, and even in physics and related disciplines) that does a fairly good job of keeping you safe from dangerous crowd events, even when you don't notice it.

It was fairly obvious after the Valley Stream incident that many of these big box stores would have to retain consulting from such people, so the story itself strikes me as fairly obvious "news." That said, I just wanted to register an acknowledgment in this thread that crowd experts do exist, and that most of the stuff they do for you in your everyday activities is quite beneficial. It's easy enough, I suppose, to think that all "crowd control" goes by way of pepper spray and the supposedly "non-lethal" arsenals of our law enforcement personnel. But in fact crowd science produces many structures of everyday life, and you probably drove or walked through some of them today, even if you didn't go to a store.