Walmart "Fat Girl Costumes" Name Removed

Derry London, WLTX12:52 p.m. EDT October 27, 2014

(Photo: walmart)



Columbia, SC (WLTX) -- A News 19 reader reported to us this morning that a section of retail giant Walmart's website dedicated to women's plus-sized costumes had an offensive section heading: "Fat Girl Costumes."

When selecting the Plus Sized Costumes section on Walmart's website earlier this morning, the section displayed read:
Party & Occasions > Halloween > Fat Girl Costumes

The blowback across the internet has been building since writer Kristyn Washburn first Tweeted a screen shot of the costume section Tuesday, October 21st:

If you visit Washburn's Tweet above, you'll see that Walmart's Social Media management staff responded about 15 minutes later, however, changes to the section were not made until today (Monday, 10/27) while we were researching for this article.
As we were searching Walmart's website, we found the "Fat Girl Costume" section display still active when following the link from the first article to appear about this issue, on Jezebel.com.

When searching Google, there is still a link that displays in the search results, and a Google Cache version of that page is still available. The linked page now shows "We found 0 items for the "Fat Girl Costumes page"

An updated "Fat Girl Costumes" search on Walmart's website returned this page(Photo: screencap)


Clicking through the menu options on Walmart's website, we could not find the section with the Fat Girl Costume heading, and when following the menu option to Women's Plus Costumes, it displayed the plus sized selections under the section heading:

Party & Occasions > Halloween > Women's Plus Costumes

Then moments later, the section display changed.

There is still a menu option for Women's Plus Costumes, and when following that link the page name displayed on our web browser tab still says "Women's Plus Costumes," however, the section display is now slugged:

Party & Occasions > Halloween > All Costumes > Adult Halloween Costumes

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.

We have submitted a request for official response to Walmart's media contact and will update here once that is received.
Updated at 12:20PM

A member of Walmart Media Relations reached out to News 19, WLTX in response to our inquiry, and provided this statement regarding the costume section name:

This never should have been on our site. It is unacceptable, and we apologize. We are working to remove it as soon as possible and ensure this never happens again.
http://www.wltx.com/story/news/natio...line/18000419/