Collegiate Times

Happily, my Thanksgiving break was relatively quiet. By which I mean I wasn't trampled to death by a bargain-crazed human tidal wave at a Wal-Mart.

 H.L. Mencken once said "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." That time is the day after Thanksgiving. Every year. It's the only Friday in the entire year singled out by color. So you don't have to work at Wal-Mart for years (as a cashier as well as a customer service manager) to understand that when senior Vice President Hank Mullany says, "Despite all of our precautions, this unfortunate event occurred," he is full of garbage.  

Wal-Mart management is not an innocent woodland creature startled in the headlights of a Buick, and while I realize how ridiculously unlikely this next statement is before I write it, there should be some kind of legal reckoning for whoever was in charge of that Long Island store.

Jdimytai Damour didn't have to die. Don't think I'm letting the mob off the hook for this; Damour's death wasn't exactly the same as Kitty Genovese's, but there are disturbing parallels between a building of cowardly onlookers and the callousness of bargain hunters interfering with police and first responders. Police aren't optimistic about charging any of the customers with murder (something about the difficulties of proving intent as well as which foot dealt the fatal blow), but Wal-Mart and other retailers spend months whipping shoppers into a frenzy with these early-morning bargains. If a store doesn't then take adequate steps to channel that frenzy or at least keep an eye on the developing crowd, it doesn't get to act surprised when people get hurt.

The first year I worked for the Great Satan, one of our major Black Friday items was a DVD player for $50 (trust me, at the time this was a big deal). They had been advertising it for weeks, and people were frothing at the mouth when I showed up to work Thanksgiving night. One of our stores' major advantages was that we were open 24/7, so around 4:30 a.m. they wheeled out pallets with the sale items wrapped in black plastic.

As they dropped them around the store, one worker would stand on each side of the pallet to prevent people from tearing into them early. This worked because the crowd was indoors, warm and dispersed around the store, near the specific item they had come to buy.

At 5 a.m., one of our managers gave the signal, and then we tore the plastic away and fought our way to safety with our standard-issue machetes. I'm kidding, of course; all we had were box cutters. But because our management team had done a bit of advanced planning we didn't even need those.

People shopped and left as if it were a normal weekend rush. The next day the injury reports rolled across the airwaves; my favorite holiday miracle story concerned a lady in Florida who had broken her arm trying to obtain one of the aforementioned DVD players.

Not only did that Wal-Mart's management set one aside for her, but they promised to hold it for her until she could leave the hospital and come to the store to buy it herself. As of this writing I am unaware of any efforts on the Long Island management's part to set aside one of their 50-inch Plasma screen HDTVs for Mr. Damour's family.

I understand he was a temporary worker placed at the door and was therefore not technically a shopper, but now that parts of the mob that killed Damour are expressing remorse, it's the least Wal-Mart can do to express something besides no comment.

"It felt a little freakish," customer Ellie Berhun, 48, told the Daily News. "Some man lost his life because a VCR was on sale? Please. It's just too sad for words."  Though she's about 10 years behind on her shopping, I agree with Berhun.

One of the reasons that I enjoy the Thanksgiving season is that after the Halloween merchandising season, it's nice to take a breath and just relax before the manic overcommercialicide of Christmas and the fourth-layer saccharine Hell that is Valentine's day. Thanksgiving isn't any more pressure than dinner, football and raking leaves. Here's hoping that next year's day-after is a bit less insane.