Crazed Consumers Shop 'Til They Drop -- Sometimes Like Flies Folks Lined Up for Sales Get Injured in Stampedes; Stores Try Crowd Control
By RICK BROOKS and CHAD TERHUNE Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The day after Thanksgiving, KSLA-TV cameraman Bobby Baker drove to the Toys "R" Us store in Bossier City, La., ready for a fight. Three years ago, he had videotaped a fracas over $99 television sets at a local Kmart. Now, more than 400 people were lined up in the cold outside Toys "R" Us, ready to grab karaoke machines, "American Idol" drum sets and other sale items.
He wasn't disappointed. When a woman tried to cut in line, two other women who had been waiting for hours started brawling with the line-crasher. "They pushed her and grabbed her by the neck," Mr. Baker says.
Mr. Baker's footage was shown across the country, and sports channel ESPN named it one of its "Top 10 Plays" that weekend. "No. 3," Mr. Baker proudly says of his ranking. "Hopefully, I'll find another one before Christmas."
The odds are in his favor, as shopping stampedes become a violent fixture of the holiday season. As store aisles begin to take on the atmosphere of the running of the bulls at Pamplona, some say retailers are waving red flags, with sales starting before dawn and with "doorbuster" discounts that customers take all too literally. Police and emergency crews will be on alert again this weekend, aware that the last Saturday before Christmas is typically the busiest shopping day.
The day after Thanksgiving in North Versailles, Pa., Police Chief James Comunale sent a third of his 26 officers to the nearby Wal-Mart Supercenter after getting two 911 calls, including a report of a "near riot," he says. Officers found a female customer conked on the head by a flying DVD player, apparently tossed by a customer.
"It's a drain on our police department," says Chief Comunale. "If anyone should be arrested, it's the Wal-Mart manager." Chief Comunale plans to request a meeting with Wal-Mart officials before next year's holiday rush. A Wal-Mart spokeswoman says company officials "always welcome advice which will help us." The North Versailles store, she adds, is "very busy," and it isn't unusual for there to be "excitement during the first few minutes of the sale."
That same day, Diane Dallman arrived at the Wal-Mart in Tulare, Calif., at 4:30 a.m. with her eye on a $99.46 flat-screen TV and a $20 radio-controlled toy Hummer. Shortly before the store's 6 a.m. opening, she says, customers in the front of the line started yelling "Get back!" at people who tried to cut ahead. They even erected a makeshift barricade out of shopping carts to foil some line-breakers. When the store opened, a door hinge snapped under the pull of an excited shopper who should have been pushing.
In Riverside, Calif., the fire marshal recently met with local Wal-Mart officials to "discuss their crowd-control plan," says Mike Esparza, a Riverside Fire Department battalion chief. The meeting was triggered partly by shoppers on a mad dash last Christmas in which three Wal-Mart customers were injured, he says, including one woman treated for a broken foot after being trampled.
Shoppers who have been caught in shopping stampedes say it can be terrifying. Carla Neiswanger, a high-school counselor in South Windsor, Conn., says she held onto her sister as they were swept into a Wal-Mart in Manchester, Conn., by a throng of shoppers the day after Thanksgiving. She says the shoppers nearby yelled, "Just go with it! Don't fight it!"
Crowd Control
Retailers say there's only so much they can do to corral unruly shoppers. Sometimes, a hot product is the culprit, like the Tickle Me Elmo in 1996, which some soon dubbed "Trample Me Elmo." Some stores hire extra security guards or bring in police. Electronics giant Best Buy Co. and KB Toys Inc. sometimes hand out tickets needed to buy the most popular items. Since most of its 1,300 toy stores are in malls, KB encourages managers to borrow a nearby theater's velvet ropes for nightclub-style crowd control. Some store managers try to pacify crowds with free coffee and doughnuts.
Laura Byrne Paquet, the Ottawa author of a new book on the history of shopping, says melees are nothing new. They frequently erupted at Canadian department stores that held sales during the Depression. Once, a man fell and cracked his head on an iron fixture and was whisked out of sight by a store employee. She thinks it's worse today, with so many people starved for time. "The idea of standing in line and waiting patiently has gone by the wayside," Ms. Paquet says. Adeline LeTourneau of St. Paul, Minn., says she still fears crowds seven years after an incident at the Kmart in nearby White Bear Lake. She stood third in line outside the store, hoping to buy a Tickle Me Elmo doll as a Christmas present for her granddaughter.
When the doors opened, people behind Ms. LeTourneau began to shove. She says she was thrown to the floor and stepped on, hurting her hip, which had to be replaced about a year later. Kmart set aside a Tickle Me Elmo for Ms. LeTourneau but made her pay for it. The retiree, now 75 years old, sued the retailer for more than $50,000 in damages, and the retailer settled the case for "what my lawyer wanted," Ms. LeTourneau says, declining to be more specific. A Kmart Holding Corp. spokesman declined to comment on the suit.
"I decided never to go to one of those [sales] again," says Ms. LeTourneau, who has 13 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren on her Christmas list. "People don't even care who's in the way."
No Injuries
Kmart says its employees "are trained to manage crowd control in an orderly manner," adding that no one was hurt when more than 1,500 of its stores opened at 6 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving.
The spokeswoman for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. says policies for its 2,900 stores and Supercenters in the U.S. are set on a "store-by-store basis." She says safety officials "review and make necessary changes to improve what they are already doing."
In a widely publicized incident the day after Thanksgiving, Patricia VanLester was first in line for $29.87 DVD players at a 6 a.m. Wal-Mart sale in Orange City, Fla. At 6:03, someone inside the Wal-Mart called 911 asking for medical help. When paramedics arrived six minutes later, they found the shopper unconscious and sprawled on the floor with a DVD player resting under her left arm.
"We had to ask people to get out of the way," says Mark O'Keefe, spokesman for EVAC Ambulance in Daytona Beach. "People were pretty focused on shopping and getting their bargain."
Ms. VanLester, 41, spent four days in the hospital. But the story took on a new twist when Orlando television station WKMG reported that she had filed 16 injury claims against retailers and other businesses.
The Wal-Mart spokeswoman says Ms. VanLester previously filed eight injury-related claims against the company. Wal-Mart says it "paid thousands of dollars on some of her past claims." Ms. VanLester, through a family member and her lawyer, declined to comment.
Wal-Mart faced at least three lawsuits from customers who claimed they were hurt by out-of-control shoppers seeking talking Furby dolls in 1998. In one of the suits, a federal court jury in Philadelphia agreed last year that the retailer didn't do enough to protect customers at a Wal-Mart in Easton, Pa., but it refused to award any damages.