An Experiment At Wal-Mart

Several months ago, me and several others researched the effects that technology has on our daily lives by way of an experiment tested at a local Wal-Mart superstore. We determined, after the experiment (which I'll discuss in a moment), that technology has a very significant impact on our lives, and if just a small part of it is removed, it can cause distress, chaos, and even physical harm.

The day before the experiment, my friends and I proposed the idea to the manager of our hometown Wal-Mart, and to our surprise, with reluctance he accepted our plan with the warning: “You are responsible for all medical charges.” The manager and I signed an agreement that I would be responsible for all medical issues during the experiment and that we were permitted to conduct the experiment for five hours on the next day. He also stated clearly that we were not allowed to publish any approximate information on the location and time this occurred, but we could publish the statistics in the name of science.

Here is an overview of the experiment we conducted:

On the Sunday morning of the... Of course-unknown date, we set up to perform the experiment. As planned, at 7:00 AM the manager of Wal-Mart ordered the three sets of main entrance automatic opening doors to the Food Center to be set to manual, where the doors would open when they were commanded to be two of my friends in the operations center of the store. I stood twenty feet from the entrance dressed in the people greeter uniform and recorded the number of people who walked into the door, or came too close.

Here are the statistics:

According to my recorded information, a total of 85 people walked into the door on caught themselves too late. 58 of these were men, 27 were women.

20% of the people entering the doors nearly ran into them. Might not sound like much, but in science 20% is pretty big.

Casualties were minor compared to our hypothesis; one 60 year old woman hit the door hard and suffered a concussion and was sent to the emergency room (I paid the bill and apologized to the woman). No other serious injuries occurred.

One biker man discovered the experiment after walking into the door and became angry; he threatened to “kick my ass in the parking lot”. He was twice my size, but luckily I was licensed to carry a firearm in public.

We met a psychologist at the entrance who almost fell for it at around eight AM; by 9:00 AM he had sat down on a public bench and began taking notes.

We spent approximately $1500 dollars on the experiment. (About $1,000 for the old lady's medical bill and $500 for bribing the biker to keep his mouth shut.)

At the end of the day we determined that men were more susceptible to this kind of problem than women were, and that technology makes one lazy and unaware of what might happen if they walk at full speed towards an automatic opening door.