Defending Walmart

Before you even start to read this post you have to throw out every stereotype you have ever come to know about people. Do it right now because this is not about race, color, gender, whatever you use to classify any group of people. This story is about two groups: GIVERS and TAKERS, with an emphasis on the TAKERS. In this world you can apply these two classifications to any one person in a certain situation and it should work.  And just because you are in one group now, this does not preclude from jumping into the other group later. It all depends on the circumstances you find yourself in at the very moment in time. When confronted with one of those proverbial forks in the road of life.....are you a GIVER or a TAKER? OK, that's all we need to know to proceed.

Oops, I lied. We also need to know what EBT stands for....it is the abbreviation for Electronic Benefits Transfer and it is basically a debit card for the Food Stamp program. The Food Stamp Program is officially "The United States Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" (SNAP), which is administered by the US Department of Agriculture and disbursed through programs run by the individual states. You use your EBT card to pay for your groceries when you are down on your luck and using the food stamp program. The EBT program is administered by a third party vendor, in this case the good people at Xerox. From what I gather there was a minor glitch during some testing that lead to these EBT cards not showing the available balances to shoppers and cashiers in about 17 states. This is where the TAKERS took over started gaming the system. That is they knew they had low balances yet continued to purchase items. Most documented cases stem from Louisiana and involve the local Walmarts in the towns of Springhill and Mansfield in the Bayou State. Word got out that all limits were off and people swarmed to their local Walmarts like it was a holiday sale.

This is where I defend Walmart. There are procedures to follow in the event of an EBT outage and unfortunately it looks like they were not followed here. A local manager called the headquarters of Walmart and it is rumored that someone there gave the go ahead to accept the cards....limits be damned. I want to believe that this was a decision based on Godly principles. That is the employee at Walmart HQ was thinking that if they refuse these cards, some poor family will not eat that night. Your opinion of Walmart may vary, but real people work there and a real trusting person made the decision to accept these cards during this information blackout. I feel bad for them because their heart was in the right place, but you give a person an inch and they take a yard. Tough call.

Now the TAKERS thought it was a great call and the food frenzy was on like Donkey Kong. Grocery carts were filled to the brim and then some. The TAKERS knew it was a race against time and if you got through check out before the system kicked back on, man you were eating good for the next couple of days. I'll spare you the details but an officer commented that one family had 8-10 carts ready to go through the line. Those parents are teaching some great lessons to the kids. Also, one lady got to the cashier as the computers were fixed and she had approximately 700 dollars of groceries and her EBT card had a 0.49 cent balance. The TAKERS knew they were taking! The average balance on these cards for a household is roughly 300 dollars a month. Walmart declined to press charges against the 700 cart lady according to reports. Another reason to defend them here.

Anyway when the jig was up when allegedly somebody at Xerox walked up to the server and hit it hard on the side and it roared back to life. Our IT guy calls it percussive maintenance, but no matter what you call it, the party was over. The balances on the EBT cards were now showing up on the cash registers, and the disappointed throngs were leaving the stores as fast as they came in.  Now here's a twist, they were leaving the carts filled to the brim behind.  Not even attempting to return the goods to the shelves---RUDE!  Seriously TAKERS you could have won me over if you put everything back where you found it, but entitlement makes one lazy and they just walked right out of the stores.


Walmart your heart was in the right place, and as you read this blog, the entities involved are trying to figure out who is at fault for this mess. Xerox says Walmart did not follow procedures, Walmart refers all questions to Xerox and so on. As for me, I blame the TAKERS. They had to know they were doing something wrong.  I hope.