Black Friday Doesn't Have to Be Deadly

With every “Black Friday,” the big shopping day following Thanksgiving, come frenzied crowds seeking discounts on holiday gifts. This year, with consumers watching every penny, shoppers will get up at the crack of dawn to get that special discount.

This leaves retailers, hungry for sales, caught between trying to balance their desire for motivated shoppers with concerns about maintaining safety. They wish to prevent a repeat of the incident last year in which a crowd trampled to death a Wal-Mart temporary employee in New York.

Earlier this month, Wal-Mart said it has Black Friday crowd control plans for each of its stores, developed in consultation with safety experts that handle security at events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics, according The New York Times. The National Retail Federation and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration also each came out this month with first-ever guidelines on crowd control for Black Friday.

“Retailers are just using it as an opportunity to truly try to learn and understand what happened well and what didn’t that day,” said Rhett Asher, vice president of loss prevention for the NRF, a retailer trade group based in Washington, D.C.

NRF’s and OSHA’s guidelines recommend such measures as beefing-up communication plans among in-store staff, security and local law enforcement, offering wristbands and product tickets so that customers have an orderly way to secure sale items, using barriers to improve traffic flow within stores, as well as more evenly distributing discounts throughout stores to avoid large crowds gathering in the same area.

The retail industry is seeing aggressive Black Friday marketing campaigns that start earlier in November, said Charles Wetzel, president and chief operating officer of Buxton Co., a consumer analytics company based in Fort Worth, Texas. Sears has a “Black Friday Now” campaign with sales every Saturday morning, and Kmart is running a similar “Better Than Black Friday” promotion this month.