The reporter for this article posits a few guesses as to why Walmart dropped the case, but they don't seem interested in trying to understand why Walmart would spend a million dollars to fight a $7k fine in the first place.
My guess is that like a lot of cases like this, they are trying to keep a precedent from being set. Once you have been fined successfully for a specific thing, getting fined for similar acts later is a no brainer.
But what doesn't make sense to me in this case is why Walmart would be worried about this particular issue. It's not like they foresee a future where hundreds or thousands of employees get trampled by shoppers. Even in some nightmare scenario, it would take a lot of the $7k maximum fine to even make a dent for their bottom line.
I would be curious what their internal thinking is on this. Perhaps it was just a result of a bureaucratic rule to always contest. Or maybe it was a personal vendetta by Walmart attorneys against some OSHA employees.
As an ex-lawyer (though not in the US), I know this is a common case.
When taken individually, it looks absurd that a company would do such a thing when it is obvious that it is an economic loss.
In reality, though, most companies just look at those kind of cases in "bulk". When analyzing things at that level, those kind of outliers simply dissolve in a sea of other more economically viable legal challenges.
Those make good news stories, but in the end it is just a byproduct of scale.
I once had to go to a hearing for a 2 dollar case (converted from BRL) in a small court claim for a big Brazilian telecom. The sued company paid 10 dollars for my taxi, 50 dollars for each of my hours and about 20 dollars more for the other expenses. In the end, that single 2 dollar lawsuit cost the company about 500 dollars.
Looking at just that case, it seems absurd. But considering that that same company had 2000+ small court claims every single month, it makes sense that simply hiring someone to approve our analysis that those cases were not worth it would cost 100x more than just moving on. It was just cheaper to just keep going than to do a cost/benefit analysis on each of the thousands of suits they receivd every month.
This is specially bad in the US where the system is common law and that can set a precedent (in my case my country uses civil law, where precedents are not that strong).
Imagine not wanting to be blamed / fined for someone’s death for unforeseen circumstances and then once they were reasonably foreseen taking action to correct it.
Crowd dynamics were hardly an unforeseen and unpredictable science back in 2008. [1]
Imagine being so focused on running a sale that that you create a dangerous environment for both employees and customers, and then when this kills someone, shirking responsibility.
There's a wide line between being at fault for a death and being criminally at fault. For criminal fault, you either need mens rea, or a callous disregard for human life. Mere disregard for human life is a civil issue.
Honestly I would just doubt OSHA's authority and absolutely fight that.
A lot of this discussion is "there should be consequences" and neglecting to consider "who is the authority to bring consequences and what are those consequences". This allows for cognitive neglect that seems to simply be "any consequence from a private person or the government is a good consequence" and that's just categorically false!
so, yeah I'd take the general stance of "fuck that regulator, in particular" and it would look like "apathetic capitalist fighting thing they are responsible for" but that wouldn't be my stance at all, where I would be totally open to a more convincing authority with a more convincing case. state AG or the DOJ coming in guns blazing? Oh shit completely different calculus! Passionate labor regulator with the weakest tangentially related civil lawsuit that also has the off chance of causing more civil liability just because I was too worried about a PR hit? Gtfoh
My guess is that like a lot of cases like this, they are trying to keep a precedent from being set. Once you have been fined successfully for a specific thing, getting fined for similar acts later is a no brainer.
But what doesn't make sense to me in this case is why Walmart would be worried about this particular issue. It's not like they foresee a future where hundreds or thousands of employees get trampled by shoppers. Even in some nightmare scenario, it would take a lot of the $7k maximum fine to even make a dent for their bottom line.
I would be curious what their internal thinking is on this. Perhaps it was just a result of a bureaucratic rule to always contest. Or maybe it was a personal vendetta by Walmart attorneys against some OSHA employees.