A Black Friday Walmart glitch sent Louisiana shoppers into a frenzy Saturday night, while in other states nobody could buy anything.
Technically, Black Friday isn’t for another month, but that didn’t stop some Walmart shoppers from taking advantage of a glitch in the EBT system that created no limit on food items. The resulting chaos was reportedly worse than the sales rush that usually occurs the day after Thanksgiving, which has resulted in some disasters in the past.
The cause of the glitch, which affected several states, was a system failure by EBT vendor Xerox.
The EBT glitch was obviously being exploited, as it was discovered later when a woman with a balance of less than a dollar had a cart filled with $700 in merchandise.
At first, cashiers were skeptical. The Corporate offices in Arkansas were called and they told the store to just ring up the sales, even though something was obviously wrong. Some of them were probably depending on their purchases to get by.
Others, like the woman mentioned above, were simply out to cheat the system for all they could get. The shelves were being left empty as people came from all over to take advantage of the Black Friday Walmart glitch. As the glitch was fixed, people started abandoning their carts and leaving the store.
The crowd was so bad beforehand that the police had to intervene, Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirmed, and the employees were feeling the sting as late as Sunday afternoon, as they were still restocking the food aisles from a nearly empty state.
A similar glitch happened in Mississippi , which ended even worse. An error caused the EBT system to leave customers unable to buy anything, which resulted in a riot as some started leaving the store with their groceries and not paying. The incident resulted in the store being closed after a decision by management.
Walmart Spokesperson Kayla Whaling said of the glitch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, “For the safety of our customers we did make a management decision to close the store . We’re looking into everything; looking at surveillance video and working with the local police.”
The Black Friday Walmart glitch in Louisiana was one of the only cases where people were allowed to take advantage of the system, and they did it in great numbers.