ORANGE CITY, Fla. - (KRT) - When the siren rang at precisely 6 a.m. Friday to kick off the Wal-Mart Supercenter's five-hour "blitz" sale, Patricia VanLester was first in line to grab a $29 DVD player.

Her sister, 48-year-old Linda Ellzey, waited just four feet away with a shopping cart. But before VanLester, 41, could inch her way through the crowd with the prized Christmas gift for their mother she was knocked to the ground by a frenzy of shoppers.

"She got pushed down, and they walked over her like a herd of elephants," Ellzey said. "I told them: `Stop stepping on my sister! She's on the ground!'"

Before paramedics arrived, Ellzey said, VanLester did not recognize her and did not know where she was, nor did she remember what had happened after being flown to Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach.


Sad & pointless. And the really pathetic part is that the $29.00 DVD player she just about died for is normally $39.00. How much pain and damage do you have to withstand for the sake of ten bucks?

This is here 'cause it's Wal-Mart, and I'm blaming their blanket commercial saturation for this one. Wal-Mart likes to claim the highest sales $$ for the past couple Thanksgivings, and probably will this year as well. And people are getting trampled for it.

Yeah, I realize this is just one person in one store, but how many other incidents like this have you heard? Wal-Mart has actually caused a shopping frenzy here, people so mad for cheap consumer goods that they're willing to kick someone half to death. So I guess the question is whether that makes W-M the bad guys for instigating the frenzy, or if they're the bad guys for appealing to the worst in human nature.

'Cause, really, no matter what, they're the bad guys.


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