"People of Wal-Mart" Website Mocks Customers, Goes Viral

It's amazing what will attract attention on the Web. A website called "People of Wal-Mart" has gone viral. It's premise: it asks customers of the mega-store to submit pictures of other Wal-Mart customers wearing dated, bad attire or funky hairstyles.

"People of Wal-Mart," was started as a gag website. It's managed to go viral, with the site generating up enough traffic to crash its servers on Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, the site is still down. My advice to the site's creators: get some ad deals worked out fast, while people are still interested.

The People of Wal-Mart site describes itself as follows:

“People of Walmart was founded in August of 2009 by three friends and roommates after an inspirational trip to WalMart. Let’s face it; we all have seen the people who obviously don’t have mirrors and/or family and friends to lock them in a basement, and they all seem to congregate at Walmart. It’s not everywhere that you can shop for milk at 10 a.m. next to a 400lb mother of 6 wearing a pink tube top, leopard tights, and hooker heels.”

Hilarity, yes, but I personally avoid Wal-Mart, so for years I have not been subjected to the people who visit that store. I simply can't bring myself to visit a store that treats its employees so poorly as besides having its sweat-shop manufacturers.

The "People of Wal-Mart" site is run by Andrew Kipple, 23, his brother Adam, 25, and Luke Wherry, 23. The site was getting 500,000 hits a day, which it could handle, but a recent spike as more people found out about it crashed it.

The "People of Wal-Mart" Twitter feed says that yesterday the site received 1.2 million hits, despite all the downtime. They also said they hoped the servers are up, which, sorry to say, at the time of this writing, they are not.

Photos already submitted included a man dressed as Captain America, a person whose haircut was described as looking like a rat, and a person with a goat. It's unclear if the person was married to the goat or not, but still.

Some have criticized the site, saying "People of Wal-Mart" mocks poor and rural patrons of the store, thus reinforcing stereotypes. Me? I think it's all in fun.