14 DAY TRIAL // Employees at Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana handled a crisis this weekend, which they compared to Black Friday.
The cards that allow an Electronic Benefits Transfer system were not showing any limits. The cards allow government food stamp values to be transferred on them, the Blaze explains.
Since the system malfunctioned, customers could purchase an infinite amount of merchandise without actually having the funds to pay for them on their cards.
“I saw people drag out eight to ten grocery carts,” Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd describes for ABC News.
A single shopper walked away with hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries. The shelves of the store were left bare.
“It was definitely worse than Black Friday. It was worse than anything we had ever seen in this town. [...] There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no meat left. The grocery part of Walmart was totally decimated,” Lynd describes the situation in the Springhill store, near the Arkansas border.
Staff called the corporate headquarters, and they were allowed to ring in the orders, from 7 to 9 p.m. on Saturday.
Walmart spokesperson, Kayla Whaling, explained that they were “fully engaged and monitoring the situation and transactions during the outage.”
“We did make the decision to continue to accept EBT cards (and purchases on WIC and SNAP) during the outage so that they could get food for their families,” she tells KSLA News.
The problem was fixed by 9 p.m., when customers were alerted via intercom that their cards were back to normal. Many of them left the store, abandoning their carts on store aisles.
“At that point in time, they knew the jig was up and they couldn't purchase what they wanted to,” Lynd adds.
The EBT system is sold, installed managed and checked by Xerox. Walmart and Xerox are currently negotiating who is footing the bill for the customers' shopping spree.