Julian Price

People of Walmart Pictures - Humiliating, Embarrassing Invasion of Privacy or Fair Game Comedy?



Posted: Thursday, February 17, 2011

by Julian Price
http://www.uk-freelance-content-writer.co.uk/

It seems that the website or blog known as People of Walmart is causing quite a stir as it has been jamming up the channels on Google Trends in the last few days thanks to its “funny pictures”.

Now it must be stressed that Walmart itself has nothing to do with the website but People of Walmart” is essentially a collection of pictures taken of seemingly unaware shopping customers, in how can I say this, perhaps their least flattering poses. Perhaps to give you a clearer picture, Wikipedia describes the site as follows, “a comedy website that features user-submitted photos of overweight, poorly dressed, or awkward looking people shopping at Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer.”

So, why has it hit the news? Well it seems that some folks are more than a little unhappy about seeing themselves or their relatives turning up on the internet in less than gracious circumstances.

There are images of people who are either knowingly or unknowingly revealing a little more flesh or underwear than perhaps they had intended and then these pictures get flashed around the internet, after some happy snapper has randomly taken their photos.

The website is hugely popular (and has a Google Page Rank of 6) and this wouldn’t be the case if a lot of people didn’t find it funny or amusing, but perhaps we should ask ourselves how we would feel, if broadcast on the world wide web in somewhat of an uncompromising position?

Well, I suppose it happens to celebrities all the time.

The title tag of the page is “Funny Pictures at Walmart”, but I wonder who would be doing  laughing if our pictures appeared on the front page!

What do you think?

 
Julian has diplomas in freelance journalism (with distinction), copywriting and proofreading. He is also a creative writer and poet who writes both professionally and for pleasure. Julian has written articles for an internet marketing company and although this medium is often restricted by topic, his writing still maintains a unique and often humourous style, with many of his articles achieving good results on search engines. He has found the discipline involved with this kind of work to be a great writing exercise and believes it enhances and improves other areas of his writing. Julian is becoming an established freelance writer and many of his articles here at searchwarp are a showcase of the variety and quality of his work.

This Article has been viewed 1,294 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Anonymous 1 year 80 days ago.
the people are embarrassed that their privacy was invaded....they should be embarrassed by the way they dress in public...if you dress as they do, how could they have any shame ? how can you embarrass someone who isn't exactly out of Vogue...If anyone is going to sue, it should be we who have had our eyeballs attacked and severely damaged by seeing them.
» left by Julian Price 1 year 80 days ago.
58 fans. Follow Julian Price on twitter!
I totally see your point. Like I said in the article, celebrities are being snapped like this all the time, and they (in most cases) are unable to take legal action. Having said that, we are not all able to look like we stepped out of the pages of Vogue magazine, so I don't really think people can be held accountable for not quite being "model" material! Thanks for your comment.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.