Tuesday, December 09, 1997

Toy rush becomes crush

Painful Christmas memories haunt trampled clerk

By CHRIS MORRIS Canadian Press

FREDERICTON -- The haunting image of a large Adidas sneaker crashing toward his face is what really defines the Christmas rush for Robert Waller.

Even now, a year after he was trampled by a crazed mob of shoppers, Waller still shudders when he thinks of the Tickle Me Elmo doll and the frenzy it created in the buying public.

Waller was working at the Fredericton Wal-Mart stocking shelves when he was asked to open several boxes of the wildly popular Tickle Me Elmo dolls for a restive crowd of about 300 on Dec. 14, 1996.

His memories of what happened after he started unloading the giggling, vibrating Elmos are clouded by pain and periods of unconsciousness.

"It was a mob mentality," he recalls in an interview at his Fredericton home.

"It gets kind of hazy because I was knocked out. I was kicked in the head and stepped on. I remember this large, heavy-set woman wearing white Adidas . . . she stepped on my face. It was horrible. It only took a $25 toy to turn a bunch of adults into a bunch of degenerates."

Waller had to be rushed to hospital with broken ribs, a concussion, back and leg injuries and cuts and bruises. He was in rehabilitation until the spring and unemployed until the summer.

"I'm a night-shift clerk now at a local convenience store," he says with a rueful smile. "It's a good job. It's safer than working at Wal-Mart. At least I have a bat to protect myself with."

Waller is still considering legal action against Wal-Mart, which laid him off following the incident, and he's very unhappy about the treatment he received from workers compensation, which paid him only $83.

But he's determined not to let what happened ruin his Christmas spirit or the seasonal joy he shares with his wife, Kate, and their two children, Emily and Erik.

"We never received a Tickle Me Elmo and we never wanted one. I thought they were tacky to begin with. Nothing but building blocks and such for my kids."

Waller is still at a loss to explain what possessed the people who trampled him.

He said he remembers seeing excited and gleeful faces in the crowd and he knows that to those people, he simply didn't exist.

At the time the incident occurred, the Elmo craze had reached the point where some people were paying thousands of dollars for a single doll.

"If it happens again, I'll feel disappointed but I won't be surprised," Waller says. "As long as there's a toy out there that becomes a status symbol for parents, there's always going to be this kind of foolishness."

Toy experts say what happened at the Fredericton Wal-Mart was no accident. Frenzies for certain toys, they say, are engineered by clever marketing strategies.

"You will always have toys that children want because of the advertising they see on television," says Marie Levine of the Canadian Toy Testing Council in Ottawa.

"But that's different from the mass frenzy where people are paying $2,000 for a Tickle Me Elmo. That's something totally different."

Levine says there have been three items in the past two decades that have inspired the kind of intense buying pressure that caused Waller's injuries.

"The first was in 1983 or '84 with the Cabbage Patch dolls," she says.

"That came about after the advertising company sent the doll to Jane Pauley who I believe was the host of the ABC morning show. She sang the praises of the doll and it was from this sort of media exposure that the doll reached its climax where people were clamoring to get one."

She says the next craze was over Power Rangers action figures about four years ago.

Levine said that also was driven by media exposure in the form of a popular television show.

She said Tickle Me Elmo took off after the advertising company persuaded talk show host Rosie O'Donnell to plug the doll on her show.

"It's very cleverly orchestrated," Levine says. "It's not just something that happens."