Idiocy to match the turkey drop

In the absence of even a scintilla of common sense, the perpetrators of the Aotea Square ‘‘cash drop’’ might have avoided their nowguaranteed place in marketing infamy had they aworking knowledge of the most famous 1970s sitcom episodes.

The 1978 turkey drop episode of WKRP in Cincinnati would have been a useful cautionary reminder. Viewers delighted in the storyline of the station promoters dropping Thanksgiving turkeys from the sky above a shopping mall; slight problem being the inept organiser, Les Nessman, opted for live ones. Initially live, anyway. ‘‘As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.’’

The Safety Warehouse’s promise of a ‘‘100k cash drop’’ was, by its very nature, surely doomed to invite ameasure of violence from a crowd bound to include a volatile component of grasping desperation, hotheaded avarice, or both.

When the promised ‘‘actual money’’ proved mainly to be vouchers that looked like banknotes, the detonations of frustration and anger should have surprised nobody. Some people had made pilgrimages, and incurred costs, to be so duped.

Certainly there were commentators ready to snort from afar that they should all have expected some sort of trick. Mitigating this expectation is the parallel expectation that the organisers just could not be so naive as to assume there wouldn’t be hell to pay if they failed to stump up with the promised reward.

What did they expect people in the middle of a pandemic-impelled recession to do when they discovered they had in fact gained a clenched fistful of vouchers for something in which the huge majority of them had scant interest? Chuckle?

To make matters worse, the company has climbed on its high horse. Managing director Andrew Thorn adopts a reproachful tone, saying risk assessmentswere done to mitigate ‘‘offensive behaviour between patrons’’. Really?

By Thorn’s account, the behaviour of a few had ruined the tone of the day. Apparently, then, they had expected the crowd to gambol around, politely sharing the largesse among themselves. Like adults helping the kids at a lolly scramble.

And in spite of what you may have heard, lolly scrambles aren’t themselves illegal. Not even in this PC age of ours. From time to time Internal Affairs finds itself sighing softly, smiling wanly, and reassuring people that Government health and safety rules don’t in fact target these. It’s just that event organisers and grownups need to be sensible and not do anything stupid like throwing treats from floats for children to scuttle under the wheels to collect. Amatter, the department attests, of using common sense.

Well, so much for that. The organisers in this case face a call by the prime minister for an apology, a firestorm of public reproach, the frowning scrutiny of the police and the Commerce Commission, and at least an indirect scolding from the Reserve Bank, which tends to take a dim view of stuff that looks like money but isn’t.

Inherent in all this is the question of what penalties may be appropriate. But as has so often been the case of late, sadly inmatters much more serious, the wider issue here is one of prevention. Appeals to common sense after the event don’t suffice. How did it come to pass that nobody hit them up beforehand to ask what, exactly, they were playing at? It’s hard to imagine amore obvious invitation to civic disorder, even without the added provocations of the cheap-out.

Appeals to common sense after the event don’t suffice.