Anglonautes > English vocabulary / words > Economy > Consumers / Retailers > Shopping / Retail > Suppliers, Supermarkets, Consumers, Shopping, Retail > Price war, Discounts, Sales, Holiday shopping season

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York was trampled to death by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.

At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid the man. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”

The employee, who was not identified, was taken from the Wal-Mart to nearby Franklin Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., the police said. His exact cause of death has not been determined. The police said that three other shoppers were injured and a 28-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was taken to the hospital for observation.

One shopper, Kimberly Cribbs, said she was standing near the back of the crowd at around 5 a.m. on Friday when people started rushing into the store. She said several people were knocked to the ground, and parents had to grab their children by the hand to keep them from being caught in the crush.

“They were falling all over each other,” she said. “It was terrible.”

Crowds began building outside the Wal-Mart at 9 p.m. Thursday and grew throughout the night, as eager shoppers queued up in a line that filled the sidewalk and stretched toward the boundary fence of the Green Acres Mall.

At 3:30 a.m., store employees called the Nassau police to report that the crowd was growing quickly, the police said. Officers came by to try to organize the line, but were called away to a Circuit City, a Best Buy and a B.J.’s Wholesale Club nearby, to deal with crowds there.

A half-dozen Wal-Mart employees lined up in the entryway trying to hold back the crowd by pushing against the locked sliding doors, but they were overwhelmed by the force of the crowd, Lieutenant Fleming said.

As the doors snapped open and people streamed in, several people fell on top of one another. The 34-year-old employee who died was at the bottom of the pile, the police said.

On Friday, Wal-Mart released a statement saying that the man who was killed had been working for Wal-Mart through a temp agency. The company called the death “a tragic situation,” and said it was working with police.

“The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority,” Wal-Mart said in a statement.

Lieutenant Fleming said that the store “could have done more” to prevent the melee.

“I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it’s not,” he said. “This certainly was foreseeable.”

Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death by Customers,
NYT,
29.11.2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/
business/29walmart.html

Cost of a shopping basket soars

in the 'phoney' supermarket price war

Saturday, 12 July 2008

The Independent

By James Thompson
and Sam Kriss

British supermarkets have introduced massive price hikes over the past year, shattering the myth of a so-called price war in which grocers are bending over backwards to help hard-pressed consumers.

Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's have ramped up the price of many products by between 22 and 32 per cent over the past 13 months, hitting customers at a time when the cost of living is soaring, The Independent can reveal.

The soaring figures illustrate the level of food inflation heaped on consumers, as they face spiralling petrol prices, rising utility bills and stagnating house prices. The revelation comes at a time when grocers are as active as ever in claiming that they are delivering millions of pounds of price cuts to consumers.

On a sample of 17 products, Sainsbury's has hiked prices by 31.6 per cent, Tesco by 27.5 per cent and Asda by 21.6 per cent between 11 June 2007 and 11 July 2008, according to grocery price comparison site, mysupermarket.co.uk.

The Independent tracked 17 products including thick-sliced white bread (800g), six pints of semi-skimmed milk, English butter (250g) and garden peas (1kg).

Tesco has raised the price of white bread from 54p to 72p; Sainsbury's has hiked the price of Basmati rice (1kg) from 90p to £1.89p; and Asda has increased English butter from 58p to 94p, as have its other two rivals.

These figures dwarf the estimates of the British Retail Consortium, which this week said that food cost 7 per cent more in British supermarkets in June than it did in the same month last year.

Before the last weekend in June, Tesco said it would reduce the price of 3,000 items by up to 50 per cent, while Asda promised to sell 10 staple items, including bread, eggs and butter for only 50p until end of trading on 29 June. However, industry experts say the current activity on price does not compare to previous battles, and is more about PR than helping consumers.

Greg Lawless, an analyst at Blue Oar, says: "I don't think there is a price war. This is a price skirmish. The last proper price war we had was in the early 1990s ... It's not in Tesco and Asda's interests to launch a price war as it would suck profits out of the sector."

Retailers themselves agree. Malcolm Walker, chief executive of the frozen food specialist Iceland, said successful retailers would not do anything to jeopardise their profit margins. He said: "No retailer can afford to drop more than one point – one-tenth of 1 per cent – on the gross margin and anything they do on price is tactical." He added: "It is all marketing and spin."

Bryan Roberts, global research director at Planet Retail, made the point that price cuts and promotions were often funded by suppliers. He said: "Effectively, promotions cost the retailers nothing because it is the suppliers who are often asked to invest in these 'price promotions'."

The big three grocers say that while the price of commodities, such as wheat, meat and dairy products, have risen sharply over the past year, they try to cut prices for products that are not affected by the same inflationary pressures.

A spokeswoman for Sainsbury's, which claimed last month that its food price inflation was about 3 per cent, said: "The increases in the cost of commodities such as wheat and dairy have had an impact on the price of foods." An Asda spokeswoman said: "We disagree that supermarkets are unfairly passing on costs to customers.

A Tesco spokeswoman said: "We know customers are tightening their belts and wherever possible we look at cutting prices to help them.

"The 7 per cent [price rise] figure from the BRC is realistic. It's easy to skew figures by only choosing a certain basket of items for price comparison."

Cost of a shopping basket soars in the 'phoney' supermarket price war,
I,
12.7.2008,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/
cost-of-a-shopping-basket-soars-in-the-phoney-supermarket-price-war-865803.html

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