10 Things Walmart Has Yanked Off the Shelf

1. Barbie's Pregnant Pal

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In 2002 Walmart cleared its shelves of Barbie's pregnant friend, Midge. The doll, which featured a removable stomach complete with deliverable baby, was part of Mattel's "Happy Family" set that also included her husband and son. However, customers complained about seeing pregnancy enter into Barbie's universe, and Walmart pulled all of the Happy Family sets from its stores.

2. A Shirt That Read "Someday a Woman Will Be President"

 In 1995 a Miami-area Walmart pulled this shirt from its racks after consumer complaints. The shirt, which featured the character Margaret from Dennis the Menace, ran afoul of "the company's family values," so it went back to the stock rooms. Eventually more reasonable, non-Stone-Age heads prevailed, and the shirt made it back onto the shelves after three months in limbo.

3. Underwear

Panties that say, "Who needs credit cards..." on the front and "When you have Santa" on the rear. The undergarments started showing up in Walmart's juniors departments in December 2007 and quickly started an Internet firestorm over the perceived message of using Kris Kringle as a sugar daddy. While the same joke would be fairly harmless on, say, a t-shirt, many women felt that its placement on underwear added a sinister sexual undertone aimed at adolescent girls. In response to the public outcry, Walmart pulled the offending underthings from its shelves.

4. Confederate-Themed Barbecue Sauce

Back in 2000, the U.S. had a similar debate about whether the Confederate flag should be flown over the South Carolina State House. That battle also spilled over into Walmart's grocery aisles. At the time, 90 Southern Walmart stores were marketing a mustard-based sauce created by Maurice Bessinger, an outspoken advocate of flying the Rebel flag over the State House and owner of eight Piggie Park restaurants.

During the flag debate, Bessinger replaced all American flags at his eateries with Confederate flags, a move that Walmart saw as objectionable and needlessly provocative, so the company yanked his sauces from its stores. (Don't feel too bad for Bessinger, though; it took nothing less than a 1976 Supreme Court intervention to force him to serve African Americans in his restaurants.)

5. Naughty Leopard Costume (for Toddlers)

Last Halloween, Walmart made headlines for selling and later pulling a "Naughty Leopard" costume that oddly didn't look all that naughty (or leopard-y, for that matter). Score one for parents not ready for the sexualization of Halloween creeping into preschool.

6. An Al Snow Action Figure

In 1999 Walmart put the brakes on selling an action figure featuring WWE hardcore wrestler Al Snow. Snow's wrestling gimmick at the time involved walking to the ring while carrying and talking to a mannequin head. Naturally, his action figure came with the head as an accessory, but two professors at Georgia's Kennesaw State University saw the inclusion of the head as a problem. They told the press that by selling the action figure society was "normalizing violent treatment of women. We are telling little boys that this is acceptable behavior." (Please, parents: don't ever give your sons the impression that carrying and talking to part of a mannequin is acceptable.) Following the outcry, Walmart quit stocking the Al Snow action figure.

7. Lad Mags

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If you're a frisky 17-year-old looking for the latest Maxim, Stuff, or FHM, don't head to Walmart. Back in 2003, the store banned the so-called "lad mags" due to their racy photo spreads and bawdy editorial content.

It's actually not all that uncommon for Walmart to give a single issue of a magazine an ax, too. In the past, the store has refused to stock issues of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition and a 2001 issue of InStyle that featured an artistic nude shot of Kate Hudson.

8. Music

Walmart has long declined to stock any music bearing a parental advisory warning for explicit lyrical content, but the company's fastidiousness with regards to music doesn't stop there. When the store carried Nirvana's album In Utero, it changed the song title "Rape Me" to the less offensive (and less coherent) "Waif Me." Similarly, the store declined to carry Prince's 1988 album Lovesexy because of a fairly tame cover that featured a nude photo of the artist.

9. Superbad DVDs

When the comedy Superbad hit store shelves in 2007, it came with a little extra: a replica of the fake Hawaii driver's license used by the self-dubbed "McLovin'." Most movie fans would simply see this freebie as a little reminder of one of the movie's funniest scenes, but Hawaiian authorities simply felt it was a fake ID. Honolulu mayor Mufi Hannemann requested that Walmart pull the DVD from store shelves across the state, and the retailer quickly complied.

10. Cuban Pajamas

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Walmart's Canadian stores found themselves in a pickle in 1997. The Canadian subsidiary had begun selling Cuban-made pajamas at eight bucks a pop across our neighbor to the North, which enraged both the company's home office and the U.S. Treasury Department.

The stores quickly pulled the offending PJ's, which led to a second problem: this action may have violated a Canadian law that forbids abiding by the American embargo of Cuba. After the Ottawa government pointed out that Walmart could face a million-dollar fine for pulling the sleepwear from its shelves, the Canadian Walmart stores reversed the ban after one week.