Some shopping trends are far cry from 2021
NEW YORK — While Black Friday will mark a return to familiar holiday shopping patterns, uncertainty remains.
The U.S. job market still is strong, consumer spending is resilient and inflation has been slowing. But elevated prices for food, rent, gasoline and other household costs have taken a toll on shoppers.
As a result, many are reluctant to spend unless there is a big sale and are being more selective with what they will buy — in many cases, trading down to cheaper stuff and less expensive stores.
Shoppers are also dipping more into their savings, turning increasingly to “buy now, pay later” services such as Afterpay that allow users to pay for items in installments, as well as running up their credit cards at a time when the Federal Reserve is hiking rates to cool the economy.
Such financial hardships could help drive shoppers to look for bargains.
Isela Dalencia, who was shopping for household essentials such as detergent at a
year-old Andre Bing, he opened fire on fellow employees in the break room of the Chesapeake store, killing six people and leaving six others wounded. Police said he then apparently killed himself.
Employee Briana Tyler, who survived the shooting, said Bing appeared not to be aiming at anyone in particular. Tyler, who started at Walmart two months ago, said she never had a negative encounter with Bing, but others told her that he was “the manager to look out for.” She said Bing had a history of writing people up for no reason.
Walmart launched a computer-based active shooter training in 2015, which focused on three pillars: avoid the danger, keep your distance and
lastly, defend. Then, in 2019 after a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, store in which an outside gunman killed 22 people, Walmart addressed the threat to the public by discontinuing sales of certain kinds of ammunition and asked that customers no longer openly carry firearms in its stores. It now sells only hunting rifles and related ammunition.
Walmart didn't specifically respond on Wednesday to questions seeking more detail about its training and protocols to protect its own employees. The company only said that it routinely reviews its training policies and will continue to do so.
Densley said that employers need to create open channels for workers to voice concerns about employees' behavior, including confidential hotlines. He noted
that too often attention is focused on the “red flags” and workers should be looking for the “yellow flags” — subtle changes in behavior, like increased anger or not showing up for work. Densley said managers need to work with those individuals to get them counseling and do regular check-ins.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security's active shooting manual states that human resources officials have a responsibility to “create a system for reporting signs of potential violence behavior.” It also encourages employees to report concerning behavior such as increased absenteeism and repeated violation of company policies.
But many employers may not have such prevention policies in place, said Liz Peterson, Quality Manager at the Society
for Human Resource Management, an organization of more than 300,000 human resources professionals.
She noted that in a 2019 SHRM survey of its members, 55% of HR professionals said they didn't know if their organizations had policies to prevent workplace violence, and another 9% said they lacked such programs. That was in contrast to the 57% of HR managers who said they did have training on how to respond to violence.
A recent federal government report examining workplace violence over three decades found that workplace homicides have risen in recent years, although they remain sharply down from a peak in the mid-1990s.
Between 2014 and 2019, workplace homicides nationwide increased by 11% from 409 to 454. That was
still down 58% from a peak of 1,080 in 1994, according to the report, which was released in July by the Departments of Labor, Justice and Health and Human Services. The report found that workplace homicide trends largely mirrored homicide trends nationwide.
But the country's spike in mass public shootings is raising awareness among employers of the need to address mental health in the workplace and prevent violence — and of the liabilities employers can face if they ignore warning signs, Peterson said.
In one high-profile example, the family of a victim filed a wrongful death lawsuit earlier this year against the Northern California Transportation agency, alleging it failed to address the history of threatening behavior of an employee who shot and killed nine co-workers at a light railyard in San Jose in 2021.
The transportation agency released more than 200 pages of emails and other documents showing the shooter, Samuel James Cassidy, had been the subject of four investigations into workplace conduct, and one worker had worried that Cassidy could “go postal.” That expression stems from one of the deadliest workplace shooting in U.S. history, when a postal worker shot and killed 14 workers in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986.
“Workplace violence is a situation that you never think is going to happen to your organization until it does, and unfortunately, it's important to prepare for them because they are becoming more commonplace,” Peterson said.