The New York Times details the intense security and crowd-management needed to keep shoppers safe this "Black Friday:"

A year after an unruly crowd trampled a worker to death at a Wal-Mart store, the nation’s retailers are preparing for another Black Friday, the blockbuster shopping day after Thanksgiving. Along with offering $300 laptops and $99 navigation devices, stores are planning new safety measures to make sure the festive day does not take another deadly turn.

Last year, frenzied shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., trampled Jdimytai Damour, a temporary store worker who died soon afterward. To prevent any repeat, Wal-Mart has sharply changed how it intends to manage the crowds.

That new plan, developed by experts who have wrangled throngs at events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, will affect how customers approach and enter the stores, shop, check out and exit. Each store will have its own customized plan. The hope is for an orderly Black Friday, a seemingly incongruous notion.

I’m all for keeping people safe in our big box stores. But the fact that people have died because of over-eager shopping, or that this level of crowd-control is needed, says to me something is fundamentally off in our society. And the fact that we’re coming up with ever-more-complicated ways to keep ourselves safe from our consumption habits, instead of reflecting and adjusting those habits in the first place, just drives the point home.