Wal-Mart Website "Accidentally" Equates Black People with Apes!

According to the Associated Press, Wal-Mart is shutting down the system that creates movie recommendations on its web site after it offered a "Planet of the Apes" DVD as a related link when users were on pages for DVDs about famous black Americans, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Wal-Mart said Thursday it had removed what it called the "offensive combinations" from a walmart.com page advertising a boxed DVD set, "Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series." Under a "similar items" section, the DVD set's page linked shoppers to four films about the lives of King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner. Wal-Mart later altered the page to link with television show DVDs.

The world's largest retailer said the software that generates links for shoppers from one movie to others of similar interest would be shut down. All cross references would be removed as soon as technically possible until the system can be fixed, Wal-Mart said.

Bill Wertz, a spokesman for the Bentonville, Ark.-based company, said it wasn't yet clear how or when the technical problem arose. "We're still looking into it," he said. Wal-Mart moved swiftly after a link to the page for "Planet of the Apes" began circulating on the Internet.

"We are heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to correct the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said in a statement.

They also added that the system made other odd matches for related products that did not make sense, though non quite as offensive as this. Supposedly implying that the system is faulty at its core and constantly reccomends non-related products and that it is a coincidence that Planet of the Apes happened to be one of them for Black themed DVDs.

Hmmmmm.