Every Day Is Black Friday

The rising tide of violence in retail outlets.

White supremacist murderer Patrick Wood Crusius, 2019.

I think we can state with reasonable confidence that Andre Bing was not what Walmart looks for in an overnight manager. “He was always saying the government was watching him,” recalled Shaundrayia Reese, who worked with him from 2015 to 2018. “He didn’t like social media and he kept black tape on his phone camera. Everyone always thought something was wrong with him.” Everyone was right. On Tuesday he opened fire at the Chesapeake, Virginia Walmart where he worked and killed six people. Six others were injured.

People used to go postal in post offices. Now they go postal in schools, in nightclubs, and, increasingly, in retail outlets like Walmart. (Patrick Wood Crusius, pictured above, killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019.) Assaults are up in the retail sector, too. One reason store settings are favored may be that there are fewer human beings around, and more self-checkout machines. Another may be that even though average hourly pay is up, this is still the economy’s bottom rung. Black Friday, the Friday-after-Thanksgiving sale day that reliably creates grotesque tableaux of misbehavior, appears to be on the wane, and that’s good. But every day is starting to look like Black Friday. I wrote about this in my latest New Republic piece.