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ov. 26, p. 1

It sometimes happens that poor people have to push and shove each other, and often they become victims of fatal stampedes just to get a small package of alms during religious holidays such as Idul Adha or Christmas.

But according to a sociologist, what happened on Friday — the need to indulge in luxury commodities — has apparently made the city’s middle class willing to use any necessary means, even at the cost of their own lives, just to fulfill some need for personal satisfaction.

Your comments:

What a ridiculous headline, “Middle class ‘mentally under-developed’”, as a member I am deeply insulted.

Shopping for bargains means nothing more than “people like bargains”.

Ibrahim
Bali

I read this article criticizing the middle class but then I looked at the photo. Who is queuing? Could they be queuing to resell the discounted BlackBerrys for Rp 2 million profit perhaps? Not middle class at all.

Billy White

Note that the “object of veneration” is largely symbolic. Whether it’s religious people fighting to “stone the devil”, consumers chasing gadgets or impoverished people seeking handouts, the performance of the queuing/struggling ritual and the joining of purpose with like-minded others mean just as much as the attainment of the nominal
objective.

The risk of disorder will always be high because part of the excitement for the participants is the possibility of being carried away by their hunting and herding instincts.

John Hargreaves

However, in most queues (Melbourne, LA, Osaka and Seoul, as far as I’m concerned), there were no reports of casualties, let alone fatalities. None were there in the two links posted.

Perdana

First of all, I don’t see how people lining up to get a much-coveted product can be described as material veneration.

Although that explanation may be true, it is more like a weak, unsupported hypothesis.

As one reader has pointed out, there are other examples in other countries involving other groups of people that wait long hours to get their hands on a product. Star Wars die-hards camping out to watch the premiere of the latest Star Wars movie come to mind.

In my opinion, stampedes occur more because there is no queuing culture in Indonesia. Indonesians have no respect for queues, period. You encounter this culture (or rather, lack of it) in restrooms of even the high-echelon Jakarta malls.

Kwe