It is no secret that a crisis spreads like wildfire, and even more so that social media is heightened in todays world. Most of our news comes from an online source, rather it be a news media outlet, social media outlet, or an email. For this reason millions of people can become educated quickly on a companies crisis, and maybe even more the company does. As stated in the book by Dr. Luttrell, 50 percent of communications professionals believe that organizations are not adequately prepared for a crisis. Our favorite supermarket, Walmart is under fire for having “fat girl Halloween costumes” available this 2014 Halloween season.
Let me just start with, not only is this a crisis but a hot social topic too. Walmart fell very short on the barging shopping this time. First, I really don’t know where to start because I have so many different thoughts with this topic but yes those women are so fat, I’m surprised they fit on one page. (kidding) Really Walmart, fat girl costumes was the best you could come up with. Put aside from this outrageous concept was the way they handled it. This is an example of what not to do in crisis management, ever.
What I found so appalling was the fact that Walmart, themselves put this up on their site. This wasn’t a rude jokester just getting a good laugh. Thankfully Walmart did take down the fat girl part of their line but the apology was lagging in every way. The comments that came from a spokesperson that made an auto-saved answer. Walmart also ate a slice of humble pie saying, “This never should have been on our site,” a company spokesperson said. “It is unacceptable and we apologize.” The representative also said Wal-Mart was working to ensure that a goof up like this “would never happen again.” After the standard and heartless apology, they edited they site to say plus size costumes. I guess that will do.
Lets check over their crisis management plan with the five most important stages of crisis management stated in the book:
1. Prepare in advance
2. Isolate the incidence
3. Evaluate the impact
4. Mitigates the crisis
5. Learn from the crisis
After looking over this list, I am not to impressed with their action plan. This was overly insensitive for so many people and Walmart as a company acted like this was no big deal at all. I am personally not a large fan of Walmart but this was really the icing on the cake for me. I hope that Walmart can learn from this experience and think before they act. Crisis management can either help a company grow or break them. The effects can be lasting such as rise in media inquiries, flurry of comments on social media, drop in sales, and vulnerability of personal, societal, and economic conditions. Quick actions is the best practice to stay ahead of the crisis spiraling out of control.
The Social Project 
My initial reaction to the Walmart “fat girl’ costumes is WOW! I remember we briefly talked about this topic in class but didn’t pay it any mind. But after reading your blog and going on the links I couldn’t believe that Walmart would put “fat girl” costumes when “plus sized” costumes would have been sufficient. I liked how you tied the Walmart crisis into the chapter this week. Because not only from looking at your blog and links I could tell that Walmart did a pretty poor job at managing this crisis. Looking at the five steps talked about in the chapter I would say that Walmart handled only did the first two steps correctly. I feel that Walmart didn’t effectively handle this crisis at all and looking at the last step they didn’t learn anything from their mistakes. Giving mad consumers an unemotional response back that said almost the same thing to everyone impacted is not enough. Also just saying we’re sorry we shouldn’t have had that up on our website to begin with isn’t enough. Because clearly someones job is to make the Walmart website and they thought that putting the tag “fat girl” costumes instead of “plus size” costumes was okay. And then further thinking about it that others in charge of the website didn’t notice the tag line as well? Overall, I feel that other brands can learn from Walmart’s bad example of managing this crisis. Also looking at this crisis, and how bad management can hinder a brand I wonder if Walmart was actually hindered by this crisis. Or since they are such a huge corporation is they can still walk away from a crisis like this on top and can spare to loose a few consumers.
I agree that Walmart’s apology was probably not the best. They said it was unacceptable and that they were working to remove it as quickly as possible, but a little more transparency would have been nice. I would have liked to hear that they are looking into why it was put up on the site, and if there would be any consequences for the person that did so. I agree that the company did not treat the situation like it was a big deal. It may not have been as big of a problem as the BP oil spill, but it could have had a lot a huge impact on a lot of its consumers that I don’t think anybody at Walmart thought about. However, I can give them props for responding to tweets on Twitter. I think that was a good start to handling the situation and consumers were able to get quick responses from the company.