I hope each of you TMT readers had a very special holiday season. Things went pretty much as they always do for me: another year where I drink too much eggnog on Christmas morning, another year where I’m asked never to return to the Gap my ex-girlfriend works at, another year where I don’t get my family any presents and call it art. Nothing too exciting. My only regret is that I didn’t stock up on MP3 players at Wal-Mart when I had the chance.
Until recently, Wal-Mart was known across the globe as a promoter of mainstream values. Who could forget the way they so nobly released a version of Nirvana’s In Utero featuring the song "Waif Me"? Until this winter, everybody everywhere adored absolutely everything Wal-Mart stood for. Yet the retail chain has recently made some enemies via its latest experimental marketing strategy. The new promotion, which Wal-Mart has yet to officially recognize, involves allowing customers to buy MP3 players, chock ‘em full of pornographic material of their choosing, and return them, where they will then be mixed anonymously in with other MP3 players and sold. The lucky winner of such an MP3 player was Cookeville resident and father of three, Daryl Hill.
Hill bought each of his children an MP3 player as Christmas presents and foolishly neglected to check the allegedly brand new MP3 players for pre-loaded porn before giving them away. His 10-year-old daughter ended up with the MP3 player, who apparently watched a substantial amount of video. Hill was quoted as saying "Within 10 minutes, my daughter was crying... I wish I could take the thoughts and images out of her head." What happened during the first nine minutes of the video is unknown, though it is believed that they were comprised mostly of “softcore” or “upstairs” footage.
Hill would not accept a replacement from Wal-Mart, presumably due to the slight chance it would contain a genie or a money machine, which would likely induce fits of violent weeping in his daughter lasting for weeks on end. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart has since ended the promotion and has both returned to its former policy of not placing used items back in stock and initiated a campaign encouraging customers not to buy MP3 players, put porn on them, and then get busted by their 10-year-old daughter.
