Post from the Wench board.
Nov. 28th, 2008 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelleSo everyone's shaking fingers and bemoaning the lack of personal responsibility these days. One person even went so far as to blame Christians for the Black Friday deaths. As usual, knee-jerk reactions just annoy me. So I posted this:
"A 28-year-old pregnant woman was knocked to the floor during the mad rush. She was hospitalized for observation, police said. Early witness accounts that the woman suffered a miscarriage were unfounded, police said."
And remember: crowd mentality means that while yes, everyone is responsible in part, no one is responsible for the whole. I'm sure no one there-- save a few complete fuckups-- went out with the intention of hurting anyone else. They just do not know what's going on, and/or are too overwhelmed to do anything but go with the crowd.
And this has absolutely, positively NOTHING to do with religion. I'm not even sure it has anything to do with greed. It's just the incredibly dangerous physics of mobs. People are trampled to death at the Hajj in Mecca every few years. At festivals in India. At soccer games in Europe. It's crowd mechanics. It's not a matter of one person being more responsible or more reckless. It's just animal instinct. Enough people, and enough tension, and this kind of thing can happen anywhere, at any time.
Which is why the stores need better crowd control, plain and simple. MOST stores are fairly hurried but not full-blown riot scenes. There should have been NO reason for ANYONE to fear for their lives going shopping this morning.
I, on the other hand, had a perfectly normal day in retail today. My customers were almost uniformly lovely, with the glaring exception of one staggeringly ignorant, selfish, careless woman. She asked to see a lovely, handcrafted sterling silver ring with a large, lifelike poppy on it. The band was adjustable. She couldn't get it on her finger, and so proceeded to wrench the band apart until it fit. I didn't realise how badly she'd bent the ring until she handed it back with an "I'll think about it," which is code for, "I don't want it." Even better, she spent ten minutes going through every damned small hoop earring on our rack at the register, trying to pick two that matched precisely. They're sixteen damned dollars-- who gives a damn? And of COURSE, when she picked her precious cheap earrings, she chose one from two different pairs-- the tagged one. So I had to take the tag off one and move it, which is annoying. I made sure to make a slightly large deal of taking out the mandrel and carefully, carefully bending the silver ring back into its proper shape.
No harm done, but I wanted to bitchslap her.
I had one lovely woman just coming home from Bermuda, where she was visiting her daughter and family. She was at the Zoo and Aquarium yesterday with her granddaughter's class! I had one gentleman who was coming home from burying his father yesterday. I felt terrible for him. My first sale was to a little girl who bought two tiny glass animals. We couldn't figure out what one of the others was-- coulda been a cat, coulda been a beaver. Her mom thought it was a chipmunk.
It was a nice day. I did, by the time I left at 6, more than half the store's business myself. Not a bad Black Friday.
"A 28-year-old pregnant woman was knocked to the floor during the mad rush. She was hospitalized for observation, police said. Early witness accounts that the woman suffered a miscarriage were unfounded, police said."
And remember: crowd mentality means that while yes, everyone is responsible in part, no one is responsible for the whole. I'm sure no one there-- save a few complete fuckups-- went out with the intention of hurting anyone else. They just do not know what's going on, and/or are too overwhelmed to do anything but go with the crowd.
And this has absolutely, positively NOTHING to do with religion. I'm not even sure it has anything to do with greed. It's just the incredibly dangerous physics of mobs. People are trampled to death at the Hajj in Mecca every few years. At festivals in India. At soccer games in Europe. It's crowd mechanics. It's not a matter of one person being more responsible or more reckless. It's just animal instinct. Enough people, and enough tension, and this kind of thing can happen anywhere, at any time.
Which is why the stores need better crowd control, plain and simple. MOST stores are fairly hurried but not full-blown riot scenes. There should have been NO reason for ANYONE to fear for their lives going shopping this morning.
I, on the other hand, had a perfectly normal day in retail today. My customers were almost uniformly lovely, with the glaring exception of one staggeringly ignorant, selfish, careless woman. She asked to see a lovely, handcrafted sterling silver ring with a large, lifelike poppy on it. The band was adjustable. She couldn't get it on her finger, and so proceeded to wrench the band apart until it fit. I didn't realise how badly she'd bent the ring until she handed it back with an "I'll think about it," which is code for, "I don't want it." Even better, she spent ten minutes going through every damned small hoop earring on our rack at the register, trying to pick two that matched precisely. They're sixteen damned dollars-- who gives a damn? And of COURSE, when she picked her precious cheap earrings, she chose one from two different pairs-- the tagged one. So I had to take the tag off one and move it, which is annoying. I made sure to make a slightly large deal of taking out the mandrel and carefully, carefully bending the silver ring back into its proper shape.
No harm done, but I wanted to bitchslap her.
I had one lovely woman just coming home from Bermuda, where she was visiting her daughter and family. She was at the Zoo and Aquarium yesterday with her granddaughter's class! I had one gentleman who was coming home from burying his father yesterday. I felt terrible for him. My first sale was to a little girl who bought two tiny glass animals. We couldn't figure out what one of the others was-- coulda been a cat, coulda been a beaver. Her mom thought it was a chipmunk.
It was a nice day. I did, by the time I left at 6, more than half the store's business myself. Not a bad Black Friday.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-29 01:12 am (UTC)As for the rest of it, I see what you are saying to some extent, but I don't think the people who made up the mob were blameless. I think the most disturbing part of the Wal-Mart incident (according to several reports) was that a number of shoppers refused to leave the store or stop shopping, even though they were informed a man had been killed. WTF? The stampede I could almost understand but refusing to stop shopping after a man has lost his life is just disgusting.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-29 05:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-27 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-29 04:02 am (UTC)I wasn't going to respond to that thread at the boards, but in the end I did. Just an observation: the holiday season falls at the end of the fourth quarter. There'd still be huge sales if a major religious holiday weren't involved; stores want to clear out old merch and end the year well.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-29 05:39 am (UTC)Sigh.