Ready, Set, GO!: Wal-Mart Makes Customers Race To Get A Playstation 3

You may have heard about this already. Here's what happened:

The long, cold wait for the PlayStation 3 turned ugly on Thursday when customers eager to get in line at a Wal-Mart stampeded, trampling each other in a debacle that left at least one man injured. Some witnesses said the store's management set the scene for disaster when the crowd of about 50 people was told to race to 10 chairs for a chance to buy the 10 rare videogame systems the store expected to sell today.

"It was terrible and really, really stupid," said Quoizel Williams, 24, who was one of those waiting in line at the West Bend Wal-Mart before shifting to the location at Milwaukee's Midtown Center shopping center. "Anyone with any common sense would know things would get violent."

According to West Bend police, an assistant store manager announced to the crowd - which had formed about 7 a.m. - that the store expected to receive only 10 of the video game systems. He said the PlayStation 3s - which cost $499 and $599 - would go on sale at 12:01 a.m. today.

A Wal-Mart employee then placed 10 chairs outside the store and told people to wait in a different area, according to a police statement by Sgt. Gus Unertl and witnesses. Then, at a signal, the customers were told to run to try to get in one of the chairs.

"They lined us up," Williams said. "Then it was like, ready-set-go! I was going to run, but then I saw people getting pushed down and trampled. I thought to myself, 'no, it isn't worth that.' It was like a stampede of wild animals." Williams said that in the mad dash to seize the seats, some people plunged head-first into the chairs, desperately diving into them."It was crazy," he said. "And it's just not right. It could have been so easy to avoid that. People got hurt."

Just about everybody is criticizing Wal-Mart for this method of allocating a scarce good that is in extremely high demand, but I ask you: Isn't this exactly how we divided up the state of Oklahoma? You know, Sooners and all that?

Comments

[Noumenon]

Yeah, you think it's stupid to camp out for a PS3, remember when people used to stand in line to get into Oklahoma.