Win a baby!
eTruth.com — The Truth Online Edition! — OK. Let’s start with the 3:30 AM visit to WalMart dragging a kid in PJ’s. Is this normal in Elkhart, Indiana? I mean. really!
ELKHART — James Manges II didn’t win a prize. But he was one of them for a while.
Danielle Manges said her 3-year-old son Jimmy has been sick and sleeping odd hours so they went shopping at Wal-Mart, 175 W. C.R. 6, Thursday morning and finished before 3:30 a.m. While they waited for a cab, she let the boy play on some of the rides.
“He got mad because I didn’t have enough money to get a toy out of the vending machine. It was the one with the claw” to grab prizes, she said.
“He threw his juice bottle because he got upset. I bent over to clean it and within two seconds he had climbed through the hole, into the chute and pushed the door shut so we couldn’t get him out. He climbed up in the toys and was in there for a good hour.”
Store employees didn’t know what to do, she said.
“Nobody had a vending machine key, and they told me he was going to have to be in there until like 8 o’clock,” she said.
If you ever needed proof the claw game was rigged. “Despite Jimmy’s romp in the machine, he didn’t win a prize.”
I remember another similar story recently. Does anyone else?
The part I like is how the store is to blame. The store employee is described by mom as “clueless”; mom and son, one presumes, are the bright ones.
So a kid tapped in a machine is not worth waking up the manager?
And since when is there no management in a store (even at 3am?).
I work for a small 60 chain store and we have TWO managers at the store the entire day (24/7 store).
Stupid even if it is fake (I couldn’t quite tell if this is a fake “newspaper” or not).
What’s the problem? Put in a quarter and grab the kid with the claw and drop’em in the bucket. Is he not worth the quarter to his Mom? 🙂
“I was like, he went to all that trouble to get a toy and they didn’t give him a toy,” his mother said.
Enough said.
I’m curious if the store even has a key.
Do the vendors who pay to use that space for their machines routinely leave keys with the store?
I do like the “clueless” comment – as if there is a section in the WalMart employee training manual on what to do in this situation.
My favorite bit – and what makes it seem plausible – “I think the funniest part about it is everybody who was leaving the store, went back in the store to buy cameras to take pictures of this,” said Danielle, who was among those buying disposable cameras.”
Mom is upset that her son is stuck in the machine, and that the “clueless” WalMart people can’t get him out – but not upset enough to prevent her from buying a camera to get pictures. 🙂
Nah, this is real. I live in Columbus, Indiana — not too far down the road from where this happened. It was in our local paper as well (the print edition). It was on the local news, too.
Did you ever drive by a WalMart at 3:00 am, John? It’s just as busy as it is at 3:00 PM. Especially in these small towns.
I moved here from Louisville. When I first got here, we had a WalMart (not super WalMart). I remember when the Super WM opened. There were people taking their whole familes out there and taking pictures in front of the buildling with their kids. Unreal. It quickly reminded me that I wasn’t in a big city anymore.
Mike T, You’re scarin’ me!
This entry, as well as its accompanying list of comments from readers, serves as further proof that megastores and the semi-capable brains that staff them are continuing to drive society toward an eventual cultural implosion.
It may as well be anywhere, which is the most frightening realization in all of this.
Well, the missing piece to the collapse puzzle will be an inevitable world pandemic flu of some sort. SARS is a good example of how easily people panic and it was nothing. People will stop going to these big stores which will be perceived as germ-centers and this Mega-Mart thing and Walmart in particular will be killed overnight. You watch.
As for the phenomenon above “being anywhere” — not true. In the drug-riddled cosmopolitan areas nobody goes shopping at 3 AM because they run into whack jobs and heroin addicts. This episode in the article is a pure middle-America phenomenon.
To Mike T.
Sounds like a friend of my wife. Her husband got re-assigned from a job here in Oregon – near Portland – to a small town in the mid-west.
She is amazed/depressed that the only two places – outside of church – which people can socialize, in that particular town, are the Applebee’s and the WalMart.
I think little jimmy needs a real honest beating for being a pain in the fundament.
YEP
I know the story and am working the story. Police and home office of WalMart in Bentonville AR have surveillance video. We are tracking down a claim that video shows mom helping kid into machine. Also there is word that little Jimmy’s dad was also there. Yet there is no mention of him. Local TV station claims family requested said video from WalMart.
Didn’t Buzz Light Year pull this off in the first Toy Story. Oh the stuff our kids see and try to emulate…………… Us adults would never try something we see in a movie…..
I’ve always wondering what THE HECK parents are thinking when I see them with their small children out after midnight.
Even when our daughter is sick, I don’t take her to Walmart at 3 am!
This also jogs one of my pet peeves — the incompetence of outfits like AP — which didn’t pick up the story until Sunday. They just went ahead and distributed it without any dateline other than their own — as if it had just happened.
There are a few news services which work at reporting news. AP just doesn’t happen to be one of them.
I’m a night assistant for a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania:
-There should’ve been at least one assistant on during that shift. If not, something’s fishy there.
-Wal-Mart employees don’t have keys to the vending machines. The best options in that case would be to either try to contact the local vendor, which may be difficult at that time of night, or, better yet, just call a locksmith.
-Having worked overnights in Wal-Mart, I can say a child being in Wal-Mart at that time is definitely not a rarity.
By the way, how did they get him out?
Well, for whoever said that the large city Walmarts don’t have traffic at that hour, you are WRONG. I live in a MAJOR CITY, since our metro area is several million people… and our Walmarts have people in them 24/7. And YES people do take their children out at ANY hour of the night or day… In their pajamas. Some people who work odd shifts and have toddlers/babies who don’t have to get up and go to school the next day consider this perfectly normal. (Not that I do, but hey, what do I know?) Heck, some of the parents don’t even bother with real shoes, but wear bedroom slippers out in public. (Which just makes me crazy!) The fad with young girls seems to be those stupid wild printed PJ pants… in the middle of the day… in stores and businesses… it drives me NUTS! But considering that I was at a funeral in Florida recently at a military cemetary and the people in the next funeral line over were wearing golf shirts and bright colored “hawaiian” shirts, sandals, and shorts… I have to wonder what exactly IS happening to our sense of propriety these days. I mean these were OLD people, who obviously were raised in the day of the unspoken rule “you wear a dark SUIT to a funeral”, and yet if this goes on… how whacked out can we consider sleepwear in public? At least in the case of sleepwear in public it is not considered disrespectful to the dead or their family! Anyway, I think the whole story is fishy… Yeah, I know that the news reported it, but it sounds WAY WRONG to me… Like a publicity stunt. I’d have to see the child and see the machine to believe that you could that easily climb into a claw machine. Especially since the prizes were small ones in the photos, and those are not usually found in a machine large enough to even consider allowing a kid of that size (yes, Virginia, inside of a machine that kid looks HUGE) to climb in. Not to mention that most claw machines have a baffle or drop down door that swings up into the way to prevent people from just reaching up into the machine and taking things… It all sounds VERY fishy to me. And I have known some small interaction with the news media… at least enough to know that they don’t CARE about the truth as much as about the story. (I’ve been interviewed three times for the news and they did not care so much about the truth as getting a “good picture” and getting the story BEFORE the other networks got there.) I’d wait around and see what the final outcome of any video survelliance check had to say before I closed the book on this story.
I thought it was pretty cool myself. I would have been shocked to see my child in a machine like that but nowadays people don’t discipline their kids anyway and so the kids think anything is ok. As far as the old people at a funeral in hawaiian shirts and shorts maybe those old people were trying to honor the deceased wishes. Maybe he wasn’t a “dark suit” person. I think that’s cool too. Who says a funeral has to be sad. It should be a celebration of one’s life on this earth. Who says you have to wear dark colors to funerals either? I don’t think we should judge what people wear especially if we don’t know the people and the situation.
This isn’t the same Dvorak who used to write for PC magazine is it?
I worked at this Walamrt, yes there was a manager on duty, no we did not have keys, yes the vendor was called, a locksmith called by the police got him out, no the mother didnt buy the camera she took it (shoplifted), and the reason she was there is she was on house arrest-probation and wanted to avoid getting in trouble (which she didnt) and yes there is supposely a video that shows some of the plight of the little guy getting in there (bad angle and doesnt show everything) and mother was not seen in it around the child…this was turned over to the state att. office