From Firedoglake:
given Walmart's history of shall we say less-than-progressive policies can anyone explain how listing biographies of Martin Luther King, Jack Johnson and Dorothy Dandridge under the "similar products" category with Planet of the Apes looks anything but awful?
I'm not familiar enough with Walmart's recommendation system. Could this have been gamed by someone externally via reviews or shopping cart associations, or was this some idiot Walmart programmer or shopping system admin who still displays a gun rack and a confederate flag in the back window?
Either way, this is almost too shameful to be believable. Has anyone else noticed it's 2006?
Update: Looks like someone at Walmart has done a quick cover-up. I'm not sure what Friends, Everyone Loves Raymond, and Star Wars Trilogy have to do with Planet of the Apes. Though, is it just me or are Friends and Everyone Loves Raymond the whitest sitcoms on television... sure, Ross has a monkey, but come on, a monkey is not an ape.
Response From Walmart: I received an email from Wallmart's PR firm. It's posted in it's entirety in the comments. They've taken the entire related products system offline and have apologized for the offensive product mappings. They did have this to say, however:
Walmart.com's item mapping process does not work correctly and at this point is mapping seemingly random combinations of titles.
You can be the judge of whether these relationships were seemingly random or not. To my eye, it appeared to be some insensitive individual's deliberate attempt to relate the products. Without knowing more about their product mapping system, it's hard to say whether this could have been a Walmart employee, or someone externally gaming the relationship engine.
Crooks & Liars posted some
screenshots of the site before it was removed. Does this look random?
Another Update: San Diego Johnny writes that he noticed this
way back in October. So this has been live on walmart.com for several months!?! Yikes.
