Woman Receives Severe Chemical Burns From Flip Flops, Walmart Tells Her To Complain To Manufacturer

A woman from Florida claims to have purchased some flip flops from Walmart, put them on her feet… only to suffer some sort of severe chemical burn along the lines where the straps of the flip flop met her feet.

She’s been documenting the process as the chemical burns get worse and worse… and oh my god. It’s horrible. First it’s just a red angry burn, but soon blisters appear and then break open. It’s just getting worse and worse.

Kerry writes:

Well, after wearing them my feet would be red and sort of tingly, but I figured that it was just because it was first flip flops of the year so my feet need to get used to them. Blabity blabity… Well I have now had this chemical burn for 11 days, (As of July 3rd) I really thought it would just go away on it’s own. It is absolutely going away very well at all…this started on June 22nd 2007 and has just gotten worse basically. I have only worn those shoes 15 minutes here, half an hour there, hour there…and so on, NOT enough time to burn my feet like this!

She’s tried to contact Walmart to ask them to stop selling the flip flops, but their response was to tell her to contact the manufacturer in China.

Kerry describes her attempts to warn Walmart about the shoes:

I called the home office and nicely explained that I used to be an employee, and I bought the shoes, and I just want to make sure that no kids were hurt…bla bla. The home office was pretty decent about the entire thing. Then the store in Summerfield called, July 2nd 1:44 pm and left a voicemail, They told me I had to come in. The GM (Richard) told me who to talk with the training manager (Mike Sidel) and

when he would be in. He (Richard) seems to be a nice guy. I went in 15 minutes to a half an hour after getting the voicemail. I thought it was important to go in there.

I couldn’t believe how rude and mean, and obnoxious Mike was to me, he acted like I was making it all up, I tried to show him my injuries so he would take it a bit more seriously

& he turned his head away so that he could say he never saw it. Infact, everyone in the office was acting as if I were the “bad guy” I told him the details and he filled out a report. He asked me,

“well, what do you want me to do about this?” I told him that “if there was infact a problem with the shoes that I wanted to make sure someone knows so this doesn’t happen to anyone else” .

He told me “well, nothing will come of this because you bought them in April and you are just now reporting this?”

When I tried to explain the timeline to him he didn’t want to listen and turned his back on me so I just quit talking.

Here’s the letter Walmart sent:
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And here’s a photo of Kerry’s feet. The entire progression of the burn is documented on her site.

kerrysfeet.jpg

If this is a hoax it’s the most crazy, painful, scary hoax ever. Kerry is asking that people help her get the flip flops recalled and we don’t blame her.

Has this happened to anyone else? Kerry says another woman emailed her to say she also had chemical burns on her feet from the flip flops. Anyone else? Both woman supposedly bought the flip flops from Walmart in April.

Please let us know.

YET ANOTHER ONE OF MY FOOT STORIES [LeMana Photography]

UPDATE: Kerry’s site went down, so we mirrored her photos here.

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