When does a crowd become a mob?
When I was younger I worked retail, and I remember dreading the holiday season; we’d be completely busy, and customers were never ruder. I’ve seen ads poking fun at rabid crowds trying to break down doors before stores open to get the latest deals around the holidays, and it’s always some comment about how the store’s prices left the customers chomping at the bit to save that 15%. Of course when parody becomes reality, it’s always ugly, and today had to be worst, aptly named, Black Friday ever. The reports of people getting violent in an effort to secure a cheap blue-ray dvd player, or flatscreen TV is enough to tell you things have gotten out of hand, but today there’s plenty of examples that show that this kind of frenzied shopping needs to end. I’ve compiled as many as I can stand just to point out that is a systemic problem, and our consumerism culture has once again gone too far.
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Commentary: AB sold to InBev
Where there's Life...there's Bud!
NOTE: As a St. Louis native, I was asked to comment on the sale of local St. Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch to European beverage conglomerate InBev. The following are my comments from the thread.
A couple of things here, AB has been a big STL employer for years sure, but just because they’re big doesn’t mean they’re good. Look at other big employers here; Boeing, AG Edwards and now AB – while they’re headquartered here, they’re not much more than bragging rights for St Louisans – just because they’re based here, they’re far from ‘local’. They’re all multi-national corporations which means the money is a) not staying here and b) is fluid, ready to be munched up by the next corporation up the chain, which leaves the employees as a line item – so much for loyalty. So why should a local market worry about a corporation that doesn’t care about them?