Every year at Black Friday, the giant retailer conducts what in reality are gigantic social experiments on the American public, experiments designed to induce a need in its customers that is so primal, people will drop all inhibitions in order to get a deal.
Example: Facing criticism for their lack of planning in a 2008 Black Friday incident when a store worker was trampled to death by 1,000 salivating shoppers, Walmart this year decided to open its doors on Thanksgiving day and stage sale items throughout the store so managing the queue would be easier and customers would be less panicked.
Then, at 10pm on the button, Walmart -I shit you not- borrowed a page from Pavlov's dogs and blew a whistle to signify the start of the sale.
Mayhem.
Shoppers reacted quickly, as they were trained to do. In Porter Ranch, California, a woman doused fellow customers in pepper spray so that she could get an XBox 360 console before anyone else did. In Arizona, an elderly shopper concealed a video game in his belt line for unknown reasons (perhaps to protect his grandson), then got face slammed & knocked out by overzealous cops. An off-duty cop let loose with the pepper spray inside a Walmart in North Carolina and a victorious shopper was shot in a South Carolina Walmart parking lot.
I'm sure the vast majority of Walmart Thanksgiving sales went off without a hitch, and that's a good thing. But that doesn't change the fact that the retailer is still conducting massive social experiments on people, experiments in which they attempt to modify Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs into something like this:
where the need for cheap shit made in China is more important & basic than safety, security, and physiological needs like breathing, food, and water.
People don't normally act like this. If you polled a thousand people and asked them if it was okay to do an act of violence as long as you got an XBox at the end, I wager most would say No. Walmart doesn't want violence either, but they do want to modify your behavior such that you'll do things you normally wouldn't do in order to get some cheap shit from China. Hence the mass social experimentation and the introduction of a whistle (I hope some sociologist somewhere is planning to write a paper about this!).
Of course marketing is a discipline in which you convert a consumer's want into a need, and so Walmart is no better or worse than any other retailer. But given their reach, their broad footprint across society, their amazing data mining techniques, and their willingness to open on Thanksgiving day*, Walmart gets special scorn this holiday season.
* Be sure to check out what happened to some Occupy protesters who occupied a WalMart electronics section and loudly shouted their manifesto to shoppers and workers
Walmart's Social Experiments
Example: Facing criticism for their lack of planning in a 2008 Black Friday incident when a store worker was trampled to death by 1,000 salivating shoppers, Walmart this year decided to open its doors on Thanksgiving day and stage sale items throughout the store so managing the queue would be easier and customers would be less panicked.
Then, at 10pm on the button, Walmart -I shit you not- borrowed a page from Pavlov's dogs and blew a whistle to signify the start of the sale.
Mayhem.
Shoppers reacted quickly, as they were trained to do. In Porter Ranch, California, a woman doused fellow customers in pepper spray so that she could get an XBox 360 console before anyone else did. In Arizona, an elderly shopper concealed a video game in his belt line for unknown reasons (perhaps to protect his grandson), then got face slammed & knocked out by overzealous cops. An off-duty cop let loose with the pepper spray inside a Walmart in North Carolina and a victorious shopper was shot in a South Carolina Walmart parking lot.
I'm sure the vast majority of Walmart Thanksgiving sales went off without a hitch, and that's a good thing. But that doesn't change the fact that the retailer is still conducting massive social experiments on people, experiments in which they attempt to modify Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs into something like this:
where the need for cheap shit made in China is more important & basic than safety, security, and physiological needs like breathing, food, and water.
People don't normally act like this. If you polled a thousand people and asked them if it was okay to do an act of violence as long as you got an XBox at the end, I wager most would say No. Walmart doesn't want violence either, but they do want to modify your behavior such that you'll do things you normally wouldn't do in order to get some cheap shit from China. Hence the mass social experimentation and the introduction of a whistle (I hope some sociologist somewhere is planning to write a paper about this!).
Of course marketing is a discipline in which you convert a consumer's want into a need, and so Walmart is no better or worse than any other retailer. But given their reach, their broad footprint across society, their amazing data mining techniques, and their willingness to open on Thanksgiving day*, Walmart gets special scorn this holiday season.
* Be sure to check out what happened to some Occupy protesters who occupied a WalMart electronics section and loudly shouted their manifesto to shoppers and workers