Screengrab from dchadd427′s video on YouTube.
Incident showing a man being taken down by police in a Buckeye, Arizona Wal-Mart.
Another year, another Black Friday marred with violence. The shopping stories that surfaced these past few days sounded like they were written for a bad horror movie.
A grandfather bloodied by an off-duty police officer,
a woman using pepper-spray to beat back fellow shoppers competing for the same item, and most horrifically,
a man shot and critically injured in a parking lot robbery as he was returning to his car.
Many of these major Black Friday incidents took place at Wal-Mart stores across the country, a retailer that’s no stranger to shopper violence. Who could forget the 2008 incident at a Long Island Wal-Mart where a temporary worker was trampled to death as bargain shopper stampeded over his lifeless body?
Frankly, it’s easy to blame Wal-Mart for many of this year’s incidents. After all, the company is the most influential retailer in the United States and promised to improve how they manage Black Friday crowds after the 2008 stampede. But the National Retail Federation (NRF) should also share the blame for standing idly by while this wave of violence continues to spread from year to year.
To understand why the retail industry’s trade organization is to blame for the Black Friday melees is to understand their ulterior motives.
The NRF’s stated goal is to be the “voice of retail worldwide,” advocating for the interests of retailers. But under the surface, the NRF has turned has turned the entire holiday shopping season into the cornerstones of their annual campaign to help line its own pockets and those of its member retailers. Using public relations experts and influential messaging, they’re able to cajole shoppers into opening up their wallets during the holidays and, in turn, rake in higher annual membership fees from their members.
Right about this time of the year, most of us will start seeing this publicity campaign in full-swing, with NRF experts on-air proclaiming how this year’s holiday discounts are better than last years, how shoppers could miss out on great Black Friday discounts, rattling off shopping statistics on your local television newscast about the robust shopping season.
All of this messaging leads shoppers into a frenzy about holiday shopping, thinking about the scarcity of deeply-discounted products and, more importantly, helps to get Americans feeling good about shopping.
In essence, their purpose is not only to help themselves and their members, but also to set up the right conditions for a profitable shopping season. In fact, the NRF has progressed so far in this goal that it even created a self-proclaimed “Cyber Monday” shopping holiday back in 2005 to help its online retail members increase their business during the holiday season. After all, if their members do well, the NRF does well too, right?
But there is a problem. As good as the NRF is at drumming up publicity and business for its members, it has an abysmal track record when it comes helping them with crowd management and security planning around these violence-ridden Black Friday events. The only advice that the organization puts out to its members is a short guide about crowd management that provides no substantive advice other than using common sense in planning sales events (as seen below or on the NRF’s Website).
NRF’s Crowd Management Guidelines 2011
If the NRF truly wishes to help its members stop the Black Friday violence and be the de facto leader of the retail industry, it needs to play a more proactive role in preventing the violence from occurring in the first place. The organization needs to use their power and influence as the mouthpiece for the retail industry to get their members to create and implement an innovative solution to the problem. Absent government regulation on this issue, NRF could and should evolve into a quasi self-regulatory organization for the retail industry on the matter of shopper safety.
Under this new model, the NRF could take the lead by requiring members to abide by a set of Black Friday operating procedures. It would require retailers to create a comprehensive plan to address crowd and security issues at each individual store on this day. Independent law-enforcement, security and crowd management experts would approve or disapprove a “Black Friday-ready” certification for each store after reviewing the plans. In turn, forward-thinking municipalities and fire marshals could also require that stores obtain this certification before being allowed to open their store for Black Friday.
Furthermore, the NRF could also require these same members to develop a uniform Black Friday shopping experience for all shoppers, no matter which big-box retailer they visit. Ideas include handing out tickets before each event that entitle the shopper to one of the door buster items to be picked up at a later time, providing copies of in-store maps to shoppers before and during Black Friday so they can find their way to product displays, and most importantly, drastically limiting the number of people allowed in the store at a time. Removing the uncertainty in Black Friday shopping helps shoppers know what to expect, no matter where they shop that day.
Screengrab of Deciple87′s video on Youtube.
Video shows incident woman releasing pepper spray into a crowd at a Porter Ranch, California Wal-Mart.
Self-regulatory organizations (SRO) are not a new concept. The National Association of Securities Dealers, National Association of Realtors and the American Medial Association are all SRO’s. Though self-regulation, the NRF can take advantage of their status as the industry leader by requiring independent verification of the retailer’s readiness to accommodate Black Friday shoppers and provide customers a consistent shopping experience across all stores nationwide.
In truth, the feasibility of this idea is debatable and the probability of it being adopted is a next-to-nil. But the hope isn’t for the NRF to fully adopt this idea. Instead, this one idea helps to illustrate that creative solutions to this problem are endless. It’s limited only by the willingness of the NRF and its member retailers to conceive and implement them. And unless they step up to quickly to solve this persistent violence, policy makers and regulators will step in and implement their own solution.
The NRF and its members may not have a legal requirement to implement such crowd management and shopper safety policies, but they have a moral and ethical obligation to protect the lives of their own customers attending Black Friday events. Let’s hope they wake up to this fact before Black Friday goes by again with yet another shopper injury or fatality.
Map of Major Black Friday Violence (2006-2011)
View Major Black Friday Violence (2006-2011) in a larger map
Legend:
Red Flag = Deaths Occurred
Yellow Flag = Injuries Occurred
Green Flag = No / Unknown Injuries Occurred
