People of Walmart

» see peopleofwalmart.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Andrew Kipple, his brother Adam and their friend Luke Wherry were in a Walmart in South Carolina in the summer of 2009 when they noticed a woman in a profane T-shirt with a toddler on a harness and, nearby, a man with a beard out of a ZZ Top video. They built a website to show their own friends. Within weeks it was one of the most-searched addresses on the American internet, and two of the three had quit their jobs.

The mechanism was as cheap as it sounds. People photographed strangers in Walmart aisles on phone cameras, uploaded the results with a caption, and everybody else rated them. Digg and Funny or Die carried it outward, Facebook and Twitter did the rest, and by 4 September 2009 Time, CNN, ABC News and the Daily Telegraph had all run pieces on it. TechCrunch's headline that day told the site's own readers to look in a mirror before leaving the house.

I have never set foot in a Walmart. There has never been one in Turkey, and the whole joke depends on knowing the specific store: the fluorescent light, and the scale of a parking lot that is full at four in the morning. Read from Ankara this was an American class document first and a comedy site second, and it was obvious which part the readers were there for.

The site lived inside a small network called Three Ring Blogs, which ran a stable of anonymous-submission humor blogs with names like That's My Boss and How I Was Dumped. Photos sorted by newest or by state, there was a stories tab split into love letters and hate mail, and there was a store selling shirts with the logo on them. Apps for Android and iOS arrived in 2017, which was late.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rules ~

The founders kept a list of subjects they would not post, and it is the most interesting surviving artifact of the whole operation. No disabled people and no Walmart employees who were on shift, and the Amish were off limits as well. They also said in interviews that they deliberately skipped the obvious rednecks and mullets, on the grounds that those were too easy to be funny.

Whether a line like that makes the project defensible is a question people argued about for thirteen years without resolving. It does tell you the three of them had thought about where a limit went, which is more than most of the sites in this category ever did.

~ the backlash ~

Walmart itself refused to engage. Spokesman David Tovar handled the press by email with one line: it "doesn't seem like it's news that there's a website that allows people to post photos on it". The company never sued, never sent a takedown, and let the thing run for over a decade using its name in the title.

The real complaints came from the people in the photographs. In February 2011 a woman named Melanie Wheeler found her mother on the site under a caption comparing her to the Trench Coat Mafia, and took the story to the press. The site's defense was procedural rather than moral: email us and we will take it down, no problem, and if you like the photo but hate the caption we can remove just the caption. That was the entire consent model for thirteen years, and it ran backwards.

~ the day it went dark ~

There is no closing post. The infobox on Wikipedia dates the end to 20 September 2022, which is also the date of the last archived capture of the homepage, and after that the domain simply stops resolving. Both peopleofwalmart.com and the www host return nothing at all in 2026.

That is a quiet exit for a site that got a week of national television coverage in 2009. By 2022 the format had been obsolete for years anyway: the submission photo blog lost to the algorithmic feed, and anybody with a phone and a mean caption had moved to TikTok, where the subject gets to answer back.

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