Walmart stores in Louisiana were nearly cleaned out Saturday night after a computer glitch left food stamp recipients with no limits on their debit cards, according to Reuters.
Managers of Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, two small towns in north Louisiana, called authorities Saturday night after shoppers filled the stores and bought groceries with their electronic benefit cards that had no limit.
EBT cards are debit-type cards issued under the state's food stamp program and coded to show the amount of money available for individuals to spend, according to Reuters. Food stamps are a federal government subsidy program for low-income people that's administered by the states.
After word spread that the EBT cards were unlimited, food stamp recipients rushed to Walmart and emptied shelves.
"Some people had eight or 10 shopping carts full of groceries," Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd said on Monday.
Walmart Stores Inc and Xerox Corp blamed each other for the glitch, Reuters reports. The Xerox systems that process EBT transactions suffered an outage stemming from routine testing of backup generators that malfunctioned, Xerox said on Saturday. Louisiana was one of 17 states affected by the outage.
Walmart will cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars in groceries purchased by food stamp families with the unlimited EBT cards, the Daily Mail reports. No arrests were made.
The stores had to stop selling food at 9 p.m. when the EBT cards' limit kicked in again. The shelves were stark and both empty and full carts were left all over the store, according to the Daily Mail.
The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, which oversees the EBT card program in the state, said Walmart could have instituted an emergency $50 limit for each customer but chose not to and therefore must pay the bill.
Walmart stood by the decision not to set a limit and said the money lost will not ultimately impact the corporate bottom line.
"We did make the decision to continue to accept EBT cards during the outage so that they could get food for their families," Walmart representative Kayla Whaling told KSLA.
Authorities said some families rang up as much as $700 worth of food in one night. The average monthly food stamp allotment in Louisiana is $136 per person.
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