What’s Worse for Wal-Mart: Lawsuit or Jesse?

Family members of the fatally trampled Wal-Mart worker are suing the corporation for not protecting their employees from potential harm from their own customers. Is a lawsuit preferable?

The family of a worker trampled to death in a “Black Friday” crush of bargain hunters at a Long Island Wal-Mart store filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Wednesday, claiming store ads offering deep discounts “created an atmosphere of competition and anxiety” that led to “crowd craze.”

The lawsuit claims that besides failing to provide adequate security for a pre-dawn crowd estimated at 2,000, Wal-Mart “engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem and was otherwise careless, reckless and negligent.”

In monitoring the coverage of this tragic event, there has been yet another aspect ignored by the PC-handcuffed mainstream media. . . .

I know I’m going to be accused by the black blogs of being a “self-hating Negro” for saying this but the pictures speak for themselves.

The basis of this lawsuit is that Wal-Mart didn’t properly prepare for the bumrush they should have anticipated.

Nassau County Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey said it was apparent to him that the Wal-Mart store about 20 miles east of Manhattan lacked adequate security to handle the crowds. He said police representatives met with retailers throughout the county two weeks before Thanksgiving and made it clear that security and crowd control for the sales was the merchants’ responsibility.

There are Wal-Marts all over the country. There were Wal-Marts that offered the same discounts and had the same crowd issues. Out of all of those Wal-Marts nationally, how many had the doors pushed off the hinges by their customers, trampling employees and customers alike?

This was obviously an unfortunate anomaly.

BUT if Wal-Mart turned their parking lot into a police state that Thursday night/Friday morning, just what do you think people like Jesse Jackson would be saying? The majority of the people in the pictures rushing the Wal-Mart doors were black. A pre-assumption they would behave unruly would have been seized on by civil rights ambulance chasers as racism.

If you think that’s off the mark, watch what happens the next time there is a similar sale opportunity in the future. Wal-Mart may opt to increase security nationally, but watch what happens should that happen in certain neighborhoods, and listen to who does the most bitching.

If Wal-Mart has the choice of paying a grieving family or a Jesse Jackson money/adverse publicity shakedown, just what direction do you think a Wal-Mart would take?

[Editor’s Note: A story about the Black Friday stampede can be read here.]