Frankly, I think people are quite disgusting. I know it's great to grab a bargain and the vast majority of people stood in line to get their purchase, but some elements of society are not quite as "refined" as others and just grab and cause problems, violence and general bruhaha.

The health and safety of shop staff has to be a consideration at this time and while it is great on Amazon or other online retail where you can sit in the comfort of your living room and avoid confrontation, in real life I think this practice should be stopped. Is it worse than the January sales? Yes, definitely and what's more, it's imported!

As money makes the world go round, so to speak, we are mostly all motivated by financial levers to a certain extent. We probably do not work for free and instead charge our employer for our services and so in turn we can pay our bills.

Half the problem today is that the media actively seek out negative news and then present that part of it, and add their own emotive words, in order to gain the maximum impact to sell their story. There is no 'reasonably practicable' consideration by the media, they just present their negative and then move on. Fair enough of course, but thank heavens we have some level headed safety advisors.

Of course then the level headed safety advisor takes a look and advises what can be done to reduce the risk in future.

Hilary is correct, some people are not refined or orderly and that can be difficult to manage without penalising all the other orderly and refined people.

Rather than looking to insurers to fix the problem we should put our safety caps on and suggest some potential risk reduction ideas which allow those who are orderly and refined to be able to shop for a 'bargain' and which allows shops to sell their goods.

Us safety people need to be really careful about all the stop this and stop that and disgusting this and disgusting that because when everything has been stopped we may just find that we humans are living a life which in itself is not favourable.

Many people get killed or seriously injured on the roads every year; let's hope that insurers can exert their influence and stop this dangerous activity. Or should we instead work to improve safety on the roads?

Regards.

With the General Election on the horizon, I decided to signal to my M P (who was canvassing door-to-door on my street this afternoon) that politicians like him should raise awareness in Parliament, with the insurance sector and the national and local media about redressing the balance between business activity and retail staff and customer safety during Christmas and 'Black Friday' sales events.

It was entirety predictable, this is how we behave and has been thus right back to when we were living in caves.
IMHO the retailers "engineered" the whole thing to get publicity and knew exactly what would happen.
The police ought to send them a big bill.

I was at a conference yesterday when the H&S head of a large retail chain gave a presentation on Black Friday. She stated that they were frankly taken utterly unaware by the events that unfolded last year and have spent much of the intervening year planning for this year's event to avoid a repeat or at least contain the damage.

There was also a telling point that the organisation in question issued a profit warning the quarter after last year's event as apparently the sales after the black Friday event were badly affected by people grabbing the bargains on that day. I suspect this is a more pressing reason for some major retailers to be declining to join the scrum, although the H&S and image concerns will also be high in their minds.