Walmart Sold Nearly $1 Million Worth of Patti LaBelle’s Pies This Past Weekend

Walmart and Patti LaBelle owe BIG thanks (and a check!) to YouTuber James Wright.

Thanks to Jame’s viral review of Ms. Patti’s pies, they’ve been selling out like hotcakes (er — pies?) in Walmarts all over the country.

A sales person at a Walmart in Valley Stream, N.Y. says they’ve been sold out ‘since saturday’ and that ‘the warehouse is also sold out.’

In another walmart in Kalamazoo, Mich. a Walmart clerk told Yahoo that the pies are selling so fast that he doesn’t have time to put dates and prices on them — he just hands them to waiting customers.

Walmart representative John Forrest Ales confirmed that the sweet potato pies are selling out at locations all across the country. “For 72 hours, we were selling one per second,” he said.  He wouldn’t comment directly on sales figures, but Patti’s pies retail at $3.48 and if you do the math it equates to just under $1 million in sales this weekend alone.

The company wasn’t prepared for such a pie onslaught.

“Friday morning, the team was working with the [sweet potato pie] supplier to see how we can keep up with the demand,” Ales said. “The supplier… was having a hard time finding [enough] sweet potatoes. So we walked down the hall to the produce department [and said,] ‘We need about 2 million pounds of California sweet potatoes!’ So that’s what we’ve been working through.”

Wow. Yeah, Ms. Patti and Walmart need to cut James a nice little check, or put him in a paid promotional campaign or something!

[via Yahoo]