The Fire Marshal

From Telkoth.net

Harry Potter events at Barnes & Noble!

Apparently they get soooo many people attending these, that the fire marshal this year was like "Hey! Your store has a maximum capacity of 200," or 300, I can't remember - anyway - "and we think you won't worry about that, so I'm gonna' be there makin' sure you guys don't fill your store beyond capacity!"

One of the managers told us about this the day of the party, and then added "how many people do you think were here the day after thanksgiving?"

So it kind of seems silly for the fire marshal to get in a tizzy about one Harry Potter event given that we're apparently over capacity every Black Friday, but on the other hand, you totally know that if businesses had it their way, they wouldn't give a damn about fire safety when it comes to people :P They'd think to themselves - and I'm going to make up a bunch of numbers here - "Okay, the chance of fire is 1 store in 2 years. Given the additional money we make alllll year every year by allowing our store to be overfilled, we've calculated that in order to lose money from that one fire (beyond what we lose even when adhering to the fire code), the store would need to have 5000 people to average out in deaths and injuries - way more than any store could actually physically hold. Therefore: pack 'em in! We make more money that way!"

That may be taking things to the extreme :P It's also possible that after one such fire event people would rant and rail about how the company didn't care about people's safety, forcing that company to put their own version of a fire code in place (only to be ignored by most store managers anyway, once the event is largely forgotten >_>)

'Makes me think of cyberpunk novels :)