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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Okay, I don't shop at Wal-Mart for a host of reasons, but there is also this...

'Fat Girl Costumes': Walmart apologizes for offensive plus-size Halloween costumes section name
Until a little after 11 a.m. on Monday, Walmart advertised costumes for plus-size women on their website as "Fat Girl Costumes."

The section name was discovered by a Jezebel reader Kristyn Washburn, who then tipped off the website. The section featured many of the same outfits as the Women's Plus Size section.
YKWIA called me this morning and told me about this. Yes, much like the Target 'manatee grey' fiasco where a dress was described like that in the plus-sized clothes line even though the regular sizes were in 'dark heather grey', we have 'Fat Girl Costumes' as a subsection of the Wal-Mart website, with a banner that read, 'Make it a monstrously big Halloween for less.' Yeah, wow, there's a way to get customers to buy your product, right? Who thought this was a good idea? And even if they were somehow costumes made in China labelled that way (and there's no indication I've found that that was the case), someone should have figured putting a subsection online with that name would be, well, bad from a public relations standpoint. Okay, yes, we know we're fat. But if you're going to use the word like this, at least be consistent, like manatee grey for regular sizes or, I don't know, maybe 'Fat Boy Costumes'--I notice it seems to be fat women who are the target here. Which is funny, because that's also the target customer, and one rule of customer service is to not offend your customer. *Shakes head.*

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