Black Friday sales are not an invention of WalMart. They opened a little later than some stores, earlier than some others.
I fail to understand your reasoning that WalMart is at fault for "having that type of sale". If this had happened at Kohl's (who opened at 4am this year) would you feel the same way about negligence?
I’m not against Black Friday Sales. But if you look out and see 2,500 people in the parking lot, and you know the width of your doors etc.. They failed to provide safe
Ingress/egress due to the circumstance that they willfully created. They failed to adequately plan for the event that they held and should have anticipated what could have happened in that neiborhood. I fault the people who did this as well. They should be prosecuted.
I tend to agree that in this situation the proprietor has liability for the death and injuries caused by the mob rush into the store.
There are probably many liable for his death, from the CEO of Walmart down to the spouse of a shopper who slept in bed while their other half went to get in the store line 30 minutes before it opened.
There’s precedent for inciting a riot by crying out ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater. Such behavior may cause a mass panic to exit the building more quickly than it is designed, resulting in stampede and possible injuries to those who happen to fall in the crowd.
Building designers must design egress to allow safe exit in case of fire. Traffic engineers design in compliance with many traffic control devices which have been codified.
I’ve noticed in Best Buy, local policies to form a queue out of the entire interior, flowing the public into sections of the building and routing them out via one large queue with the checkout counter as a chokepoint and security check. In some cases, one might be able to get into the building, but that was the easy part. It took another 30-45 minutes to get out even if you didn’t buy anything.
They might be in compliance with fire codes if everything is sprinkled or had a mass deluge system, although I wouldn’t want to be around 50 Plasma TVs during the deluge system activation.
Supermarket floor plans are also designed in this fashion, allowing for a certain throughput and security checkpoints with escape bypasses for those who decide not to transact.
Some initial reports indicated a door had been taken off of its hinges by the mob. That indicates to me there was a crowd shoving its way against the glass and the crowd shoved when it collectively thought the doors were opening.
One way of dealing with that is to place control the crowd without physical restraints, i.e. place visible lines for control where it is in everybody’s perceived interest to flow within their controls.
There are volumes written and studied in marketing and retail architectural design on this topic. I’m not current on the law in this area, though.
Our Wal-Mart is open 24/7. Folks around here are still trying to figure out why this one closed at all!