Fake Lottery Winner Enrages Burlington Coat Factory Shoppers
Earlier this week, a lottery winner pulled up her stretch Hummer in front of a Burlington Coat Factory store near Columbus, Ohio. In an Oprah-esque share of largesse, she promised to buy every shopper in the store $500 worth of merchandise. But she turned out to be no fairy godmother. She wasn't even a real lottery winner. When customers discovered the lie, they took their frustration out on the store, trashing it.
The woman asked customers to tell their friends and family about her offer and said she would stay until the store closed.
Store managers told 10TV News that she paid for roughly $5,000 in merchandise with a debit card before her card's limit was reached.
The woman then announced to the store that she was returning to the bank to secure more cash but by 3 p.m., police announced that the shopping spree was over and turned the crowds away.
The store closed early so that workers could clean up. Some shoppers said they had carts filled with merchandise. When shoppers learned the merchandise would not be paid for, some customers trashed the store.
The woman's family later came forward to explain that she suffers from mental illness, which triggered both the Burlington incident and some false 911 calls. The woman has not yet been charged with any crimes related to this incident.
Store Trashed After Woman's Lottery Claim [WBNS]
Family: Mental Illness Triggered Shopping Spree [WBNS]
(Photo: petnobis)
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People have no sense of propriety anymore. How, in any way was the store responsible? It's like that mob that trampled that poor temp worker at WalMart last Black Friday - people just get insane. Ugh
Pretty random.
Also, hooray for entitlement issues with the people in the store. Those who trashed it should be charged. Maybe vandalism?
Good grief, it seems that poor woman was manic. Why didn't someone help her before she rented the Hummer and went shopping? The daughter said she has had problems like this before, so the family knew.
The Burlington Coat Factory shoppers had no cause to trash that store. Even if the woman wasn't mentally ill (which is the first thing I'd think of if a stranger walked into a store and said she was spending $500 on everyone) it wasn't the store's fault if the woman changed her mind.
@VaMPKiSS1: So let me see if I'm understanding this. Woman drives up in a stretch Hummer, starts wandering around Burlington Coat Factory telling people to just spend to their wildest dreams and Burlington Coat Factor managers just shrug their shoulders?
Why does the video say "Women's History" at the top? Sounds a bit sexist if you ask me.
I hope everyone who trashed the store get's found out and charged.
Debit!!??
She is crazy if she has a debit card with that high of a daily limit.
@scootinger: It doesn't. It says "womAn's History" and if you mouse over it, it says that it's concerned with the history of the woman involved.
Read a little closer before you get all incensed.
I don't understand why they rioted/trashed the store. Oh noes, the Consumerist isn't gonna buy stuff for me? Maybe I should trash the comments!
@Shoelace: Manic people tend to believe that since they're feeling better, they no longer need to take their medication. Or worse, many of them feel a rush, a high, from their disorder, that drives them to stop taking their medication. Once off the meds, they don't have the presence of mind to realize they are still suffering from the mania. It's a very strange disorder.
@Shoelace: What did you want the family to do, shoot her with a tranquilizer dart? "Controlling" a mentally-ill adult who isn't under some kind of legal guardianship is very difficult.
Agree with you on the store though. Some people are dicks.
@The Cynical Librarian: You're not understanding this. The woman offered to pay and produced a debit card which, at least for a while, worked. People were calling their friends and family to come on down.
@Shoelace: It's not that easy. I have a bipolar mother-in-law, and at times she's decided that she's been misdiagnosed and stopped taking all medication. I've driven her to doctors appointments, spent countless hours on the phone with social service agencies, and generally done everything I can. There is NO legal way to force someone to take their psychiatric medication unless they've threatened to hurt themselves or others. Often the family is forced to sit by and watch the train-wreck unfold.
From other reports, she also owes around $900 for the stretch Hummer which wasn't paid. If she's that out of control, maybe she does need more than familial supervision.
@The Cynical Librarian: No - I believe the store actually called police pretty quickly to help with crowd control. It didn't get problematic until the woman couldn't pay.
I'm torn on the stretch hummer pic.
On the one hand, it isn't an H2.
On the other hand, they destroyed a perfectly good H1 to do that.
@The Cynical Librarian: In the stories that ran all day, it makes more sense (it's relative).
- Woman pulls up, offers to buy everyone at Burlington $500 worth of clothing because she just won the lottery, used to be an employee of Burlington and wants to give away her fortune.
- She tells people she's going to keep the offer of free $500 worth of clothes going until the store closes and encourages people to call friends.
- Store questions her, she says she can pay, implies she has a card/cash.
- She produces a check at some point to pay for the goods and Burlington says, "uh, no." Police tell everyone to leave the store and they basically leave the merchandise where it is because they're being booted - but it's been a madhouse all day. So store is thrashed.
It's a sad story all the way around.
@Shoelace: The family is desperate to get her stricter help. They want something that will force her to take meds, but you can't make an adult take meds.
Remember when they closed the mental institutions? This is the result.
@mythago: No tranquilizer dart but try to hide the car keys, checks, and credit cards, and call the doctor. Hopefully things will improve for this woman after the court-ordered mental evaluation.
@VaMPKiSS1: Sorry but the fact that this involves Burlington Coat Factory is hilarious to me. Maybe they're nice in other areas but the one near me is a such a dump - I can't imagine anyone going on a "shopping spree" there if there were other options in the world.
Yay, my town made the news! Now if it were only for something good instead of something crazy like this.
It's a shame that people who had no entitlement to $500 worth of stuff in the first place have to take it out on an innocent third party. Regardless of what the store did / did not do in the situation, they did not deserve to get their store demolished and lose not only the rest of the day's worth of sales but the following day's sales because they had to stay closed to clean up the mess.
"When customers discovered the lie, they took their frustration out on the store, trashing it."
Um, while kind of uneducated person would TRASH A STORE because a PERSON not even employed by said store promised to pay for items and then didn't?
I'd arrest them.
@hypochondriac: I'm guessing no one will be charged with anything. Just as with the killing last year of Jdimytai Damour, trampled to death by a crowd in front of a Wal-Mart trying to get Black Friday deals. The man died, but curiously, in that weird alternate reality known as "criminal justice," no one apparently did anything to him.
What's sad is they did so much damage it took 2 days before the store was decent enough to open.
@lmarconi: The one near my neighborhood is quite nice, actually. I especially like their dressier clothes. Yes, they have some clothes that are too flashy for taste, but they also have some really attractive menswear in my experience.
Yeah, this really wasn't the store's fault. Also don't people have any common sense to think that you know, maybe she wasn't really a lottery winner and this wasn't real? After all if its too good to be true, it probably is. I guess people get weird when someone promises free goods though.
Burlington is a huge dump here, I am not sure if I would even WANT $500 of merchandise out of there, I don't even think I could pick out that much clothing from their store or any store if I tried. I could understand if it was a mall and people were told to go haywire, but Burlington??
I would also get suspicious if someone wrote me a check, I would thank them and take it, but I definitely would not try to cash it, if you try to cash a bad check, you are held responsible for it. A good relationship with my bank is something I highly value and I wouldn't want to ruin it.
If this happened to me and it truly was real I would just tell the person I only need a few things because I really couldn't use that much clothing. I need a new winter coat right now, so I would appreciate that but anything else besides a winter coat and maybe a pair of sneakers would be overkill for me. It would just end up going to waste and cluttering my house and room.
Seriously though how many people can actually say they have use for $500 of clothing? That's a lot of clothing at least for me. I can understand if your just starting your first job, have a big family with multiple children, or something else like that, but most people don't really have a genuine need for that much clothing.
This lady doesn't need coats; she needs men in white coats!
Anyway, if she wasn't under a guardianship before, there should be no problem in getting one now.
It was probably a Nigerian lottery.
@lmarconi: Yeah I agree with this. I don't even think I could find $500 worth of merchandise in that store that I would want even if it was given to me for free. If you don't want it and cannot use it because the merchandise is not your style (I am a girl, mens clothes are pretty basic, but women's are all over the place with style!) then what is the point even if its for free. I definitely don't want to dress like someone who I am not.
Burlington used to be good here, but now its like a dumping ground for old, outdated clothing that even Marshall's or TJ Maxx doesn't buy up to sell to the customers.
@wcnghj: my debit card has an ATM daily limit but not a limit for spending at retail locations. it only gets flagged if i forget to tell them i am traveling and use it outside of my usual geographic region.
@PsiCop: That's a little different, with a huge crowd of people pushing forward, no single person is at fault. Half the crowd might have seen the man and tried to stop, but with the other half pushing forward unknowingly, there is no way to stop.
Each person in the store who committed a crime made a personal choice to cause damage to the store. Hopefully there are security cameras and each one of them are caught. Mob mentality is no excuse, no one was being forced to act that way (unlike with the Walmart mob).
Color me shocked (shocked!!) that it was a Hummer person that started this whole thing.
When I was a kid I thought I was getting a game console for Christmas. Turned out I was wrong. So I took the baseball bat I got instead and destroyed the entertainment stand. That's reasonable, right?
The whole story is WTF - but even more so why Burlington COAT FACTORY?
@wcnghj: More like "had," seeing as how she drained her account and probably racked up a bunch of overdraft fees.
@catastrophegirl: That's probably what it was, because if I was offered that much clothing. I would really have no choice because there is no way I would even be able to fit it in my drawers or closet. Of course I would feel bad doing that if someone was genuinely giving it away, so I would only take what I could use. Last time I was in my Burlington, they had a lot of cheap crap.
I wonder what is going to happen with the people who were able to get the clothing for free, apparently some clothing was paid for by the woman so a few people got their free stuff. Will the store request that it be returned or will the people who got to the register in time be allowed to keep the clothing?
If you really had a lot of extra money and wanted to be charitable there are probably many other better ways it could be done while still seeing the fruits of your labor in action.
@Outrun1986: I don't think I could find $500 worth of anything at a Burlington I would want. The one where I used to live was a total dump and most of the merchandise was lower quality than Walmart or looked like something your friends grandma with no taste would wear to a New Years Eve party.
@TechnoDestructo: Not really, there's plenty more H1s where that one came from. The real tragedy would have been if that limo was made out of some rare manner of automobile.....say like a Tucker '48
@PLATTWORX: not gonna say it but did you watch the video? I didn't even need to after reading the article. Only 1 type of person comes to mind when it it means getting something for nothing.
@sasquatch28: What "type" are we talking about here Sas? Tall, short, black, white, brown, purple, green, rich, poor... ?
I bet it looked like the American Tourister monkey commercial in there.
@lmarconi: Oh it is pretty funny, being Burlington. The one by me is a dump too. Maybe it's the same one? LOL. I only go there when I need like a suit or something, sometimes they have prices that can rival Macy's on the same items, like Jones New York stuff.
@Saites:
This is true. I'm bipolar, and at times, it's very hard for me to take my medication. I really HATE that the medication takes away certain types of my manic periods, honestly, I want the highs back but I know now that it wouldn't be very responsible. But honestly, if I start thinking about the meds too much I want to go off of them...so I try not to think about it.
You're right though; strange disorder. And it sounds like textbook mania and wouldn't have even made news if it weren't for the assholes who trashed the place.
My favorite part of this story is the riot it caused and that the shoppers took it out on the store, stealing things to boot. Burlington Coat Factory had nothing to do with this woman not making good on her promises. While it's disappointing to think you might be getting something for free and then finding out you're not, that's no reason to act like a bunch of entitled lunatics.
I have sympathy for the woman with the actual mental health problems, but what are the customers' excuses?