While agreeing that the behaviour of the mob was reprehensible, vile and displayed the sort of savage disregard for fellow mankind that one might expect from a pack of rabid dogs, one cannot help but wonder at the social "norm" that helped precipitate the event. The deliberate engineering of a competitive "me, me, me first!!" greediness in having a "sale" where a few items are tangled as bait before a dammed-up wall of wound-up, starting tape-tearing consumers is every bit as much to blame as the low-life savages who succumbed to it.
The store's policy is tantamount to incitement to riot and deserves censure at best. What do they expect when they pull stunts like dangling raw meat over the heads of a pack of starving wolves for several days, letting it be known that _only_ the first , fastest, highest jumping wolf will actually get the gravy?
People - "the people of today" - just aren't that clever or evolved. They watch reality T.V. They subscribe to political correctness. With the stripping away of the currently defined "civilization" facade, they bay for gladiatorial blood or shovel other people into gas ovens for a popular ideal. They believe in things which are provably untrue and are willing to put to death anyone who will not accept their ludicrous superstitions. They steal from other people, attack total strangers purely to enjoy the experience and drive motor vehicles with total disregard for the comfort and safety of anyone outside the vehicle. They are savage, brutal and oftentimes only held in check by fear of reprisals for not conforming to the acceptable norm. This, among all the compassion, selfless love and splendid and glorious stuff which balances it out, is the ever-present dark side of the contemporary human condition. How can we, with impunity, provoke such humankind with tantalizing evil such as these first-past-the-post "sales" where the combatants have been psyched-up to believe that the stakes are so damned high?
We can't. We can't play exploitative games like this and shirk the consequences. What has happened is the inevitable result of the deliberate, cynical manipulation of consumers into a competitive position. It will happen again unless this consumerist model is rethought to accommodate the volatility of the manipulated resource. Wal-Mart and similar concerns must reassess their entire strategy and, if they still wish to entertain shoppers with a competitive element in the hunting and killing of seasonal bargains, then they must do it in a way that cannot engender physical aggression.
Yes, the people surging into the store were stupid, savage animals but it was the store's poorly conceived hysteria-raising crowd-damming manipulating of them that made them that way. Wal-Mart are as much the killers here as anyone.