I’m sure you were as horrified as I was to hear that the annual “Black Friday” orgy of consumerism ended this year with 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour lying dead:

A temporary Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in a rush of thousands of early morning shoppers as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a Long Island, New York, store at 5 a.m., police said…

The employee was “stepped on by hundreds of people” as other workers attempted to fight their way through the crowd, [Nassau County police Detective Lt. Michael] Fleming said.

“Several minutes” passed before others were able to clear space around the man and attempt to render aid. Police arrived, and “as they were giving first aid, those police officers were also jostled and pushed,” he said.

“Shoppers … were on a full-out run into the store,” he said.

The crowd had begun forming outside the store by 9 p.m. Thursday, Fleming said. By 5 a.m. Friday, when the doors were unlocked, there were 2,000 or so shoppers, many of whom “surged forward,” breaking the doors, he said.

Even worse, had Wal-Mart taken some basic crowd-management steps, Damour’s death could have been prevented:

“This incident was avoidable,” said Bruce Both, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500, the state of New York’s largest grocery worker’s union.

“Where were the safety barriers? Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner?

“This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart,” he said.

One does wonder exactly what management at that store expected to happen when they saw 2,000 people pushing up against the store’s front doors.

But the incident raises larger questions about “Black Friday” as an institution as well.

First, while the media are all too happy to hype up “doorbuster” events at local stores, few, Vanity Fair editor James Wolcott notes, cover what those events mean for the workers who have to staff them:

What you don’t see in these Black Friday updates are interviews with the people who work in these mall chains, who have to show up at even more ungodly hours than do the shoppers in order to stock the shelves and prepare for the store openings. Openings that get nearer to the Thanksgiving meal each year, with some stores opening at midnight on Thanksgiving day and others at 4 AM on Black Friday, forcing workers to cut short their own holiday plans and put in exhausting zombie hours. It’s become an arms race between the major chains, and putting a stop to these excesses and exploitations is a stellar case for unionization. I see countless inane interviews with shoppers carrying bags full of booty, interviewer and interviewee competing to see who can be more effing cutesy, but nothing with the cashiers or shelvers after they’ve put in a long shift. How much does a security guard or greeter make at one of these malls? It never occurs to any reporter (or assignment editor) to ask; it would be a breach of journalistic etiquette to try anything that Studs Terkel.

And beyond that, it never occurs to them to ask the managers of these stores whether they ever contemplate their own role in creating atmospheres like the one that led to Dumour’s death.

There was a reason, after all, that those shoppers were pushing forward to be the first into the store — they had been told by management that inside the store fabulous deals were to be had, but only in very small quantities. It’s common for these “doorbuster” sales to feature deep discounts on featured items, but to have only a few of the item in question in stock. That means that shoppers are pitted against each other to get what they came for — which leads to mob scenes like the one in Long Island.

That would be one thing if the scarcity was natural — if there were truly only a limited quantity of the item available. But “doorbuster” scarcity is not natural — it’s imposed by the retailer as a way to whip up customer demand. They have plenty of those LCD TVs in stock; they’re just limiting how many are available at the “doorbuster” price. And by doing so, they’re creating pandemonium — and risk to both shoppers and workers.

At least there is one positive outcome from this terrible tragedy — people are starting to ask hard questions about whether it’s time to rethink Black Friday altogether:

I have been on the Black Friday beat before, when I covered retail for the Wall Street Journal, and my sense was always that people shopped on Black Friday because it was Black Friday…

Retailers and the market shy away from making grand pronouncements on the basis of isolated events, but maybe here our lawmakers can show leadership: maybe ban Black Friday — by forcing retailers to make all Black Friday prices, or all prices selling merchandise below wholesale cost, available on the internet, since all these hard-core “loss-leader” tactics to drive traffic to stores only really serves to whip shoppers into an irrational frenzy which is only dubiously justified by any profit it generates. I would venture not a single person working in retail anywhere on the totem pole really likes Black Friday for anything other than psycho-sentimental reasons. It’s a pain, it’s cutthroat, it’s subject to an absurd degree of Wall Street scrutiny and you end up losing money on the vast majority of the products whose prices you slash only to pray you make it back before December 24. It is, in other words, irrational, and by extension inefficient.

One New York city councilman has already created a bill that would require retailers in the state to provide adequate security at “doorbuster” events like Black Friday. Is this enough? I’m not sure. But I do think a debate on this issue is long overdue. And it’s tragic beyond words that Jdimytai Damour had to die to get that debate started.