by Dan Ariely
The origins of the term Black Friday are obscure. Some think that it was first used by the police in Philadelphia to describe the snarled traffic and sidewalk hassles that came with the day after Thanksgiving and crowds arriving for the city’s annual Army-Navy game. Others have defined Black Friday as the day that merchants’ balance sheets cross over into the black. Either way, it is now a de facto national shopping holiday. On TV, images of people racing through the aisles of stores for sale-priced items, in a sort of American Pamplona, have become as much a part of the day after Thanksgiving as leftovers. Shoppers get discounts, programmers get some lively content for a slow news day, and retailers get free publicity: a good deal for everyone, except for the clerks who have to work that day, breaking up fights among shoppers and cleaning up the mess left behind.
There had been injuries on previous Black Fridays, but no one had ever died before Jdimytai Damour went down in the Valley Stream Walmart. His death, and the “Walmart Stampede” that caused it, was the lead story on news channels across the country that evening, and it provoked a vast outcry of horror. In days of commentary that followed, the crowd was widely vilified. The tone of much of the reaction was captured by a letter writer to the New York Post, who blamed “the animals (you know who you are) who stampeded that poor man at Walmart on Black Friday: You are a perfect example of the depraved decadence of society today.”
A Walmart senior vice president, Hank Mullany, said in a statement, “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the deceased. We are continuing to work closely with local law enforcement, and we are reaching out to those involved.” Investigators would be reviewing video collected from security cameras and looking at purchases made with credit cards in an effort to identify individuals who may have witnessed or been involved in Damour’s death. But even if investigators could pick out, amid the flailing limbs and hurtling bodies in the videos, those who had harmed Damour, who could say that he or she wasn’t pushed by the person behind? And at any rate, the police seemed to be in no mood to “work closely” with Walmart. Rather, they went out of their way to blame Walmart for the incident. Detective Lieutenant Michael Fleming, who was in charge of the investigation into Damour’s death, said at the time, “I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it is not. Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”
Through the winter and spring of 2009, the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office prepared to bring criminal charges against Walmart for felony reckless endangerment and misdemeanor reckless endangerment. The family of Jdimytai Damour filed a wrongful-death claim against the company. However, in early May 2009, the county’s district attorney, Kathleen Rice, announced that her office had worked out a deal with Walmart that allowed it to avoid criminal charges. The company agreed to donate $1.5 million to various community projects and to create a $400,000 victims’ fund. Walmart also agreed to implement a “crowd management” plan for future post–Thanksgiving Day events at each of its ninety-two New York stores. In return, Walmart would face no charges or criminal liability for the death of Jdimytai Damour. If the company failed to meet the standards set by an independent monitor for three years, the criminal case would be reinstated. Rice, noting that the maximum penalty Walmart would have faced was a $10,000 fine, said, “This agreement does more than any criminal prosecution could ever accomplish.” Damour’s father, Ogera Charles, saw things differently. “It’s like if they were driving a car and they hit someone, killed him, and then just walked away,” he told Newsday.
At the end of May, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Walmart for committing a “serious violation” of the General Duty Clause of the OSHA Act. The clause states that an employer must furnish workers with a place of employment that is “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees.” In its complaint, OSHA listed the hazards that Damour and his coworkers faced there as “asphyxiation or being struck due to crowd crush, crowd surge or crowd trampling.” The complaint also said that Walmart “did not use appropriate crowd management techniques to safely manage a large crowd of approximately 2,000 customers.”
The proposed penalty was $7,000—not an enormous burden for the world’s biggest retailer, which had total sales of $405 billion in 2010. But Walmart elected to contest the citation and hired the Washington, DC, law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to handle the litigation. Walmart objected on multiple grounds. First, if crowd crushes and surges were recognized hazards, then why hadn’t a single OSHA General Duty Clause citation ever referred to the dangers posed by crowds before? Walmart also maintained that it had taken steps to protect its workers from the crowd, but it could not have protected workers from this particular crowd. And finally, the violence caused by the crowd was a police issue and therefore beyond OSHA’s jurisdiction.
A federal administrative-law judge, Covette Rooney, of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, was assigned to the case, but it did not come to trial for more than a year. Walmart’s lawyers filed twenty pretrial motions and responses and spent, by OSHA’s calculations, $2 million fighting the citation. In all, OSHA lawyers invested around five thousand hours in the case. Why was Walmart fighting a paltry fine so hard? To the extent that the citation could strengthen the Damour family’s civil case, $2 million could be seen as a worthwhile gamble. Moreover, no retailer welcomed OSHA jurisdiction over how it managed its customers. Casey Chroust, an executive vice president of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, told me, “The impact of this case is potentially huge. Does it mean I have to hire an event-management staff next time I hold a doorbuster sale? Does this mean every time you have a hot product—a video game, a Harry Potter book, an iPhone—much less a Black Friday sale, you’ll be liable for potential action if you don’t hire crowd management?” Willis Goldsmith, a partner at the New York firm of Jones Day, who has a long history of representing employers on OSHA issues, told me that along with the problem of defining crowd surges and crushes as recognized hazards, there was the practical matter of defining a crowd. “Ten people could have caused the injuries you saw at Walmart. So is that a crowd?”
OSHA’s burden was to prove that crowd surge and crowd crush are well-known phenomena and that crowd-management techniques could have prevented them at the Green Acres Mall. To do that, it needed to find an expert who would testify against Walmart. Most experts in the field consult for private industry—event planners and promoters, venue owners and operators, and, to a lesser extent, large retailers. Even if they agreed with OSHA, testifying against the world’s largest retailer wasn’t likely to be good for business, and many experts wouldn’t do it. But one would: Paul Wertheimer, the sixty-two-year-old self-employed owner of Crowd Management Strategies, who has been called “the marshal of the mosh pit.”
One of the best-documented crowd disasters in the United States occurred before a concert by the Who, outside Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, on December 3, 1979. Until then, crowd planning had largely been the purview of fire-safety engineers, who focused on how to get people out of buildings in the event of an emergency—not into them. The concert’s promoter, the Electric Factory of Philadelphia, had offered unreserved “festival seating”—people in the front of the line get to be nearest the stage (and, in most cases, no one on the floor has a seat at all, allowing the promoter to sell more tickets but giving the venue far less control over the audience). Hard-core fans began lining up in the early afternoon, and by six o’clock a crowd of eight thousand mostly young people had collected on the plaza outside the entrance on a bitterly cold night. The band began its sound check at around six-thirty and played for half an hour. People toward the back of the line, mistakenly believing that the concert was beginning, pushed forward. Some of the people in front pushed back, and shock waves began to ripple through the tightly packed mass. The Coliseum staff, thinking that the crowd was attempting to rush the doors and enter without paying, kept most of the doors shut, e
ven after the sound check ended and the opening time had passed.
Later, in a letter sent to the task force assembled to investigate the incident, in which eleven people died, a man in the crowd described what it was like near the doors: “The pounding of the waves was endless. . . . If a wave came and you were being stood upon with your feet pinned to the ground, you would very likely lose your shoes or your balance and fall.” Some people near the doors did go down. “They began to fall, unnoticed by all but those immediately surrounding them. People in the crowd 10 feet back from them didn’t know it was happening. Their cries were impossible to hear above the roar of the crowd. . . . There was a pile of people forming, and all of the people around them were being crushed into the pile, for there was no resistance. If the person in front of you went down, then you would follow, for there was no one to lean against.” Then the waves began to carry him toward the pile. “With this realization I began to add to the screaming, ‘They’re going down, they’re going down!’ I yelled repeatedly. . . . A wave swept me to the left and when I regained a stance I felt I was standing on someone. The helplessness and frustration of the moment sent a wave of panic through me. I screamed with all my strength that I was standing on someone. I couldn’t move. I could only scream.”
The media blamed the crowd. The Lexington, Kentucky, Herald-Leader, describing the “surging, primitive mob,” quoted a security guard who said, “Those kids were animals.” Mike Royko wrote a column for the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “Cincinnati Barbarism: A Rockwork Orange,” blaming the “barbarians” who “stomped 11 persons to death [after] having numbed their brains on weeds, chemicals, and Southern Comfort.” The promoter, Larry Magid, told Rolling Stone, “After all, we didn’t trample anyone to death, we didn’t step on anyone, and we didn’t push anyone.” Pete Townshend, the band’s leader, said, “It’s rock. It’s not the Who. It’s rock and roll. Everybody—all of us—we’re all bloody responsible.” In the end, no one was held accountable for the deaths.
At the time, Paul Wertheimer was a twenty-nine-year-old public information officer for the city of Cincinnati. He became chief of staff of the task force that Mayor Kenneth Blackwell appointed to investigate the incident. Wertheimer and some of his staff members spent months traveling around the country, talking to venue operators and promoters and public safety officials. Among the task force’s recommendations were a ban on festival seating for large indoor events and a requirement that organizers file a “crowd management” plan, similar to a fire-safety plan, but focusing on ingress as well as egress. The report pointed out that doors and turnstiles in buildings of public assembly were tested only for normal conditions and failed to take crowded conditions into account. It also called for national standards to better protect crowds. But national standards weren’t created and festival seating wasn’t universally banned. Injuries and fatalities at concerts continued.
As Wertheimer worked at various jobs in event management and public relations, “the Who tragedy kept following me around,” he recalled. “Every now and then, another incident would happen at a concert, someone would get killed, and the reaction was always the same. The industry would say, ‘How could we have predicted this? This has never happened before!’ And of course I would say, ‘That’s not true—it did happen, and here’s a report about it!’ But the industry chose to ignore that. And I thought, Somebody has to step up and do something, because there are ways to prevent these people from dying. And I guess that guy is going to be me. I am going to be the ghost of that Who concert. Those eleven people died so that these lessons could be learned, and I’m going to see they aren’t forgotten.”
Wertheimer began carefully documenting crowd-related incidents in the United States and around the world, making the information available to the public. He ventured into potentially dangerous crowds wherever he could find them and noted what he saw. In the early nineties, with the popularity of grunge music, mosh pits became common at rock concerts: fans in the front would hurl themselves at one another, and the force would carry them into other fans. Mosh pits are good places to study crowd dynamics, because they reproduce in miniature the shock waves of large-scale crowd disasters. Wertheimer, in his early forties, became a familiar figure at grunge and heavy-metal shows: “the old man in the pit,” in the words of one young fan. “I learned how to stand in the center spot,” he told me proudly, “right in front of the lead singer, three yards from the stage, and to go with the surge, and I developed my ways of getting out of tight spots, which I published in my mosh-survival guide. I worked on my peripheral vision, and learned to recognize when people are in trouble, and to understand what draws them to moshing, and how the band relates to it, and what security does in certain situations—all that stuff.” He established a web site, Crowd Safe, where he published his reports on crowds, which eventually numbered in the thousands.
As predicted, none of this helped Wertheimer’s career as a crowd-management consultant; his pugnacious personality didn’t help, either. “The industry didn’t want anything to do with me,” Wertheimer told me. In Chicago, where Wertheimer was born, on the South Side, he ran afoul of a concert promoter, Jam Productions, for helping to publicize safety issues at rock concerts. (Wertheimer brought a local news reporter with a concealed camera into the mosh pit at a show put on by Jam and pointed out the unsafe conditions. Jam contends that the footage was misleading.) Jam posted Wertheimer’s photograph around Soldier Field, and during a Pearl Jam concert he was picked up in a mosh pit by security for apparently shoving a young fan. “Obviously, if I wanted to develop a consulting business, this wasn’t the way to do it,” he told me.
After the deaths of the nine festival-goers during the 2000 Pearl Jam set in Roskilde, Wertheimer was interviewed by a committee set up by the Danish government, and recommendations he made became a part of the committee’s official report, Rock Festival Safety. He was delighted when OSHA asked him to testify in the Walmart case. “This is the most important thing I’ve ever been involved with,” he said. “For the first time, you’ve got someone powerful—the US federal government—alleging that this death was preventable, if the crowd had been handled the right way.” Was he anxious about the trial? “I know you can pay a price if you take on a large corporation like Walmart. You have to be willing to suffer the consequences. I don’t have kids to support, or a family; this is the role I take. I’m the only one who would do this. And, hey, I learned to fight on the South Side.”
During the years that Wertheimer was recording his experiences at rock concerts, researchers in academia were trying to figure out models for crowd behavior. In the early nineties, Dirk Helbing, a graduate student in physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, was looking for a suitable topic for a diploma thesis, when he was inspired by footprints left in the snow after a large event. He saw a pattern in the tracks that suggested the flow of streams, and he came up with a model based on fluid dynamics to simulate crowd movement. By comparing computer-driven simulations with empirical observations of crowd movement, Helbing and his colleagues were able to identify several patterns of collective behavior that emerge from the interactions of individuals in the crowd. These include lanes of uniform walking directions, oscillations of the pedestrian flow at bottlenecks, and “stripes” of intersecting flows. “Such self-organized patterns of motion demonstrate that efficient, ‘intelligent’ collective dynamics can be based on simple, local interactions,” Helbing wrote in a 2010 paper, “Pedestrian, Crowd, and Evacuation Dynamics,” published in the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science.
But Helbing also observed that at certain critical densities, such as occur in a crowd crush, all forms of collective behavior vanish. Shock waves are the result not of collective behavior but of the failure of it. Individuals at the back of a crowd, unable to tell what is happening up ahead, push forward, not realizing that they are injuring the people in the front. Unlike ants and fish and birds, humans haven’t evolved the capability to transmit i
nformation about the physical dynamics of the crowd across the entire swarm. Ants, for example, are able to communicate within a swarm using pheromones. Iain Couzin, a behavioral biologist at Princeton University, told me, “With ants, as with human crowds, you see emergent behavior. By using a simple set of local interactions, ants form complex patterns. The difference is that we are selfish individuals, whereas ants are profoundly social creatures. We want to reduce our travel time, even when it is at the expense of others, whereas ants work for the whole colony. In this respect, we are at our most primitive in crowds. We have never evolved a collective intelligence to function in large crowds—we have no way of getting beyond the purely local rules of interaction, as ants can.”
So is there no possibility that a crowd of bodies can be “smart,” in the sense that a crowd of minds can be? Couzin pointed to the role that “leaders” play in the sudden movements of schools of fish or in migratory herds of animals: only a few of the animals possess the necessary information about where to go, but the others spontaneously follow them. In 2005 he helped design an experiment at Leeds University led by Jens Krause, in which two hundred people were told to walk randomly around a large hall, while a few people were given specific instructions about what route to take. The researchers found that the “naive” group followed the informed “leaders,” even though they had no idea, in most cases, that they were following leaders at all. “Leadership does not require verbal communication,” Couzin told me. Studies of disaster evacuations, including the 2001 World Trade Center bombing, have shown that people who follow well-informed leaders might stand a better chance of escape than people who delay or seek their own way out, but in a crowd crush that isn’t going to help much. The leaders will be hemmed in too.