He died, protecting those who he loved...his fellow co-workers

Have you ever been in a large crowd before? When I was at Warped Tour, all it took was a couple people accidentally pushing others one way from one end of the crowd, and the whole crowd would eventually be about to fall over. Sometimes, we'd even be pushed over a few steps. There's nothing you can do. The momentum in domino situations like that is massive. It's like trying to stop a train. Once the doors broke, I'm sure the people in the back, not sure what was going on, pushed the people in the front who had no choice but to go or be swallowed up. Stopping really isn't an option in such a case. Yes, this is very sad, but there's no need to get mad at anyone

I realize I'm an ass for thinking this, but when I heard this story I thought that this was a disturbingly positive statement of consumer confidence ...

Realistically, this is a tragedy that was caused by the store manager’s inability to manage the crowds. For an event like Black-Friday it should be standard procedure to have a line-up (probably a multi-person wide line-up) where you kick anyone out of the line for any disorderly behaviour. When you let a large group of people mill-around the entrance, and for them to push/shove people in order to get into the store first, you're only asking for something bad to happen.

Poor man.. I guess it goes to show the "High Cost of Low Prices."

As HappySqurriel said, this can be prevented with better organization and crowd control.

I mean, we've all heard of the oversold concerts where a lot more than 1 person gets trampled to death. It's because nobody thinks about crowd control or security.

What's gruesome is all the people who just walked over the dead body, and then proceeded to go about their shopping. That's the inhumane part... But also not really surprising.

If they were in the crowd, that's not really their fault.  You CAN'T stop moving in a large, moving crowd or you're going to get trampled.  That's probably why the clerk was trampled.  Once again, you've got hundreds of body in motion.  Even at 1 m/s, that's a ton of momentum you've got to stop with only 70-100kg yourself.  Simply put, it's impossible.  It's unfortunate, but the clerk was naive to think he could stop a moving crowd.  The people in the front can't even stop moving, how in the world is he going to do anything?

Huge sale days should be banned. They cause no good except for the multi-billion dollar company's just profiting even more.

all for what? to save $50 on a tv? they should find those responsible and put them in jail for a very long time.

A lot of people really are savages, you know. I'm not talking about everyone, especially those who were pushed into the store by people behind them, but more of the quotes at the end of the article.

It's not being a savage ...

The people in the front of the mob will see the clerk and try to do everything in their power not to hurt him but the people behind them will be forcing them forward; the people in the middle of the crowd might know something is happening in front of them but they (probably) won't know what it is and they will be pushed forward by the people behind them; and the people at the back won't have any clue that anything is happening in front of them.

Situations like this have happened many times before (there have been some famous soccer stadium "accidents" that were caused by rush-seating) and the crowd behavior is very well understood.