Internal Website “Joke” Leads to Walmart “Fat Girls” Costumes Section

After an investigation,  Walmart officials believe it's an internal prank that was never meant to be posted nationally, but DID end up on their website. (Photo courtesy of Twitter).

A radio station in Columbia, South Carolina first broke the news yesterday, when a reporter tweeted a screen shot of the "Plus Size" costumes section of walmart.com  The "fat girls costumes" comment is just above the fourth costume on the right in the top row.

According to multiple media sources, including NW Cable News,  when customers went to the website Monday October 21st, this is what they found the following headline-display:

Party & Occasions > Halloween > Fat Girl Costumes

Radio stations WFAA and WLTX were investigating the web page, and found that although the "fat girl" sub headline went up on the site October 21st,  it wasn't until Monday October 27th. that it was taken down.

If you go there now, to walmart.com, you will see it's been fixed.   As for how and why it happened, according to NW Cable News, and Walmart officials:

It would appear that some form of internal "joke" ridiculing plus-sized customers somehow went live on the website, and went uncorrected for days, perhaps until media inquiries began."

Wouldn't want to the the IT person or people who put that in there.    Regardless of how they try to cover their tracks,  we know here at  Newstalk 870 they will be found.    From the years of website blogging and posting on our website,  master log-on and log-off and other digital records can tell you who wrote what, and posted content.

What likely happened was somebody inserted the "joke" in the "draft" or unpublished item.  Most content is scheduled in advance, then goes "live" on the site - even if it's only in draft mode for a short time.   Perhaps somebody forgot to take it out, or maybe it was the work of hackers.   But what's alarming is that nobody caught it until complaints began to roll in.