Alleged Shoplifter Dies During Apprehension Outside Walmart Store

Holiday shopping, especially during the ginned up "Black Friday" hysteria, is rapidly becoming rough stuff. However, it's one thing for things to get out of hand, and quite another for them to become fatal.

Death was the fate of an alleged shoplifter outside a Walmart in Georgia this weekend. According to a Reuters story appearing in the Chicago Tribune, a man accused of purloining a couple of DVD players was apprehended by Walmart employees and a "contract security guard" in a parking lot outside a Walmart. Possibly as a result of their zeal to subdue and maintain control of the alleged perp, the suspect died.

In some ways, Walmart provides a window into the world of downscale purchasing. In some cases, Walmart is the only shopping game in town; in others, it's brick-and-mortar's version of Amazon. Walmart has taken a lot of heat for its cutthroat business practices and predatory consumer pricing. Ask a political liberal about Walmart and one hears outrage. Then ask them about their Amazon account. "Well, that's different," I've heard more than once. Really?

For those on limited incomes, the Walmart "proposition" is alluring or unavoidable. It's easy to sit in a major city or its prosperous suburbs and tell Walmart customers to boycott the chain. In rural America's small towns, that's not such an easy formula to fulfill. The economics of scale and commoditized goods, something Mitt Romney knew only too well, work in Walmart's favor and against competition from small businesses. There's no easy answer to the Walmart-Amazon drive toward monopoly, but the death of a shoplifter is not the way to go.

 

Thinking About Black Friday On The Saturday After

When Black Friday's horror was limited to the screen.

My wife and I went to visit friends on Thanksgiving Day. We got home sometime after midnight. Our drive back to casa nostra took us past a large shopping mall parking lot. We were startled to see the lot filled with cars. At first, we thought we were mistaken about the time, and we thought it was really six in the morning. Then we realized it was the dreaded Black Friday. It was the first time we had witnessed the infamous shopping event's Midnight Madness.

Now, I can understand why someone would wait hours for a World Series seat, or a tough ticket to a musical act. I just don't grasp why anyone has to camp out to purchase a popular gadget. The hysteria underpinning American holiday shopping has become genuinely troubling. Has one ever witnessed a time when people have gone so far off the deep end to maintain a "normal" environment?

The poster is from the 1940 film Black Friday, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The movie's screenwriter, Curt Siodmak, was a Polish Jew who fled Germany during the Nazi era. Before the rise of National Socialism, Siodmak invested money in the 1930 silent movie Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a pivotal documentary about four ordinary Berliners that Criterion Collection recently re-released. The movie's co-directors were brother Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer; the scriptwriter was Billy Wilder and the photographer was Fred Zinnemann, who later directed High Noon.