It seems like every Thanksgiving, we print another story about greedy Wal-Mart shoppers trampling each other in a mad race to get their hands on cheap Chinese junk. Last year, it was a story out of Florida about a woman who was trampled in a crush of shoppers vying for a $29 DVD player. A woman was sent to the hospital, and Wal-Mart later invited her back to shop at the store. This year’s crass shopping experience on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, comes from the Wal-Mart supercenter located — appropriately — in Wallkill, New York. According to the Middletown Times Herald-Record, hundreds of shoppers were gathered at the Wallkill Wal-Mart before 5 a.m. A Wal-Mart employee reportedly opened the store with the seasonal greeting, “On your mark. Get set. Kill each other.” According to the Herald-Record, the crowd rushed to the back of the store, to feed off what the newspaper called ” a dismally scarce supply of cheap laptops, portable DVD players and cell phones.” That’s when Jessica Redner, 31, of Middletown, said she saw several women pushed to the floor.”You can’t stop to help them, because you’re the next one down,” she said. Reportedly, a 300-pound man pinned Redner against a cash register, Wal-Mart “associates” were cursing at the crowd, and the crowd shouted back at them – and at each other. “It’s disgusting,” Redner told the newspaper. The report said that Wal-Mart employees “looked frightened and bewildered” and began throwing DVD players into the crowd. Redner said she showed up at Wal-Mart before dawn to find that the popular products had been promised to other people the night
before. “There’s got to be a better way to do it,” she said
There used to be a bumper sticker that summed up this feeding frenzy by out- of-control discount shoppers. It read, “Outta My Way, I’m Shopping At Wal-Mart.” This is the same attitude that Wal-Mart uses when first trying to crowbar its way onto inappropriately zoned land in small towns across America. “Outta My Way, I’m a Wal-Mart developer.” American shoppers would kill each other for an X-box. And they go to a Big Box to do the killing. Welcome to the asphalt killing fields on Wal-Mart. For earlier stories on this same, mindless topic, search Newsflash by “injured.”
