Walmart Slammed for "Offensive and Unacceptable" Email With Racist Slur Users quickly realized that the email had been sent from the address help@walmart.com.
By Emily Rella
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Twitter users were up in arms on Monday after reporting that they had received an email from Walmart containing a racial slur.
The message, which was an auto-generated welcome message that is sent out to new users when they sign up for an account on the Walmart site, used the N-word in place of what would normally be a person's first name when they register a new account.
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"Woke up to some scandalous Walmart emails," Twitter user @gomfables wrote.
"Completely freaked me out. I couldn't believe it," another user said in reference tor receiving the email in their inbox.
Users quickly realized that the email had been sent from the address help@walmart.com.
The company released a statement in response to the backlash claiming that they were investigating the situation.
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"We were shocked and appalled to see these offensive and unacceptable emails," said Walmart spokesperson Molly Blakeman. "We're looking into our sign up process to ensure something like this doesn't happen again."
The company blamed an "external bad actor" for accessing consumers' email addresses and for creating fake accounts on the retailer's site.
Walmart also sent up a follow-up apology to those who received the racially charged email, though the various screenshots of the original email floating around the internet will make it difficult for the company to move beyond the incident.
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"We are working to update the account sign-up process to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again," Walmart's chief customer officer, Janey Whiteside, wrote in the message emailed out to customers.
All fake accounts that were created via the incident were shut down Tuesday.
