Last Saturday night, there was a major glitch with the EBT system (Xerox, a vendor for the EBT system, experienced a power outage while conducting a routine backup test in one of the company's locations) nationwide. Recognizing there was a problem with the system, Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits. Free food?! What?! Word quickly spread, dozens of people flooded the stores and cleared the shelves. For two hours people were loading up their carts, when the cards came back online around 9pm and it was announced over the loud speaker, they just abandoned their carts full of food in the aisles and left. One woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700 and only had 49 cents on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn't press charges if she left the food. Those poor Walmart workers spent hours restocking the shelves with the abandoned food. We wonder if anyone tried to buy anything other than food, like iPads or liquor and lap dances?
Sidebar: Walmart is on the hook for the overages. According to the EBT officials, no EBT card is ever limitless and when these outages happen, the retailer has a responsibility to implement emergency procedures. Those procedures include placing a phone call and verbally approving a spending limit for the customer. As for the customers who knowingly spent more money than what was on their card? They could be charged with fraud.
source: KSLA
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