“Three men were killed and 16 injured in a stampede when thousands of people rushed to claim cash vouchers at the opening of an IKEA furniture showroom...” — The Arab News, Sept. 2, 2004.
“A man was stabbed close to the store, and more than 20 people have been treated for crush injuries and heat exhaustion after thousands of people converged on...a branch of IKEA...” — BBC World, Feb. 10, 2005.
Coincidence? Carelessness? Or evidence of a pan-cultural greed-creed? Deaths and injuries in the pursuit of bargains at a store have now happened at least twice in two vastly different cultures, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. The similarities between the two are the pursuit of heavily discounted goods and the store involved.
“The management of IKEA Saudi Arabia expresses deep sorrow over the tragic incident that occurred at the opening hours of Jeddah’s new showroom and conveys its sympathies and condolences to the families of the dead,” an IKEA statement said a day after the Jeddah incident only last September.
Clearly the lesson Jeddah taught, London did not learn. For their information, it is this: Pander to the basest instincts of humans and you will engender the basest of reactions.
Should not an allegedly sophisticated global company be better informed and advised than to encourage huge crowds to mob its new store in Edmonton, east London? One eyewitness reported on LBC, a local radio station, that “shortly before midnight (the opening time of the new store) staff with megaphones were out there hyping up the crowds.”
Or are we dealing with a variant of a cynical statistical paradigm I once came across, used by political manipulators worldwide? The “acceptable level of death” as it was called is the number of deaths of people a political system can tolerate before the party in power begins to lose votes. The context in which it was used was after a series of deaths on the UK railway system that were later blamed on lack of maintenance. Apparently a few tens of deaths a year as the price of saving expenditure on track maintenance is “acceptable” but a couple of hundred is not. The paradigm also applies to deaths by hypothermia of old people unable to afford heating bills in the UK, road traffic accidents and other areas of running a complex political economy. Has it now mutated into the area of commerce? IKEA owned up to being responsible for the death of at least one of the three killed in the stampede in Jeddah and offered suitable compensation. Petty cash for a company of that size and the publicity — whether good or bad — was free.
Claude Salhani, UPI International Editor in an article following the Jeddah stampede opined that “religious reasons” were the cause, arguing that, “What attracted the crowds is the total lack of anything else to do. In a country with no social pressure valve allowing the young to let off steam, where the mutawa, will restrict the slightest form of social entertainment, the most trivial happening turns into a World Cup event.”
Nice try, Claude: How do you explain the stampede in Edmonton, in a country with only two percent practicing Christians, a three percent Muslim population and an overwhelming taste for the trivial and celebrity culture; a country with no noticeable religious imperative and a laissez-faire attitude to morality at the social and political levels where the trouser-dropping antics of celebrities is peddled as “news?”
The common denominator surely is the releasing of atavistic greed. And when the financial post-modernists and self-made billionaire idols that form the hagiography of modern Western culture announce that “greed is good,” why is anyone surprised at what happened in Edmonton or Jeddah?
And why therefore did they not act to prevent it? Maybe a score injured and one stabbed is “acceptable.”
