Wal-Mart does a lot of things to anger a lot of people. Some complain about the low wages they pay employees and others about their horrible customer service departments.
Wal-Mart recently made a mistake that could be one of their most criticized yet.
The Wal-Mart website categorizes their costumes by size and type.
For example, there is a men’s section, a kid’s section, a juniors section, a women’s section and a fat girl’s section?
Instead of labeling the costume category designed for plus sized women as Plus Size Costumes, they labeled it Fat Girl Costumes.
It didn’t take long for shoppers to notice and before long Twitter was full of hateful tweets aimed at Wal-Mart.
As if we all needed another reason not to buy from #Walmart: its #fatgirl insult to women. http://t.co/IFHT4TGlq4
— A Veggie Foodie (@AVeggieFoodie) October 28, 2014
Oh #Walmart what have you done this time?!?! #fatgirl really? plus size wasn't descriptive enough? & for fat men? pic.twitter.com/miMRDtZQwm
— christine walsh (@ChristineWalsh_) October 28, 2014
Fat girl costumes? Really? Fuck you @Walmart Guess I'm officially switching to @kroger #walmart #fatgirl #halloweencostume
— ChelC (@Blu_eyed_native) October 27, 2014
As if #walmart #fatgirl costumes weren't enough, people poking fun of them are #bullies. Judgemuch?
— Sharon Bryant (@mymerkaba) October 28, 2014
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As soon as Wal-Mart realized what had happened, they took down the category label and tweeted an apology.
@heartagramed This never should have been on our site. It is unacceptable, and we apologize. -Kinga
— Walmart (@Walmart) October 27, 2014
This really happened. Walmart is apologizing for a 'Fat Girl Costumes' section http://t.co/S3XkVoV8PG pic.twitter.com/xxTAMGyLKe
— CNN (@CNN) October 28, 2014
They did not offer an explanation on how the category label came to be and many people felt like the tweeted apology wasn’t good enough.
Do you think Wal-Mart will lose customers as a result of the website mistake or are they more likely to gain new customers with the free advertising the mistake led to?