A Walmart insider tells us that the price of cellphone chargers nearly doubled on orders from Walmart HQ in the wake of Hurricane Ike. Before the hurricane, chargers cost from $10-$15, but afterwards, they rose to a uniform $19.

The insider writes:

I work in a Walmart store in KY, and I’m writing in to let you know that my store has raised the prices on all of its cell phone chargers by almost 50%. These price changes were automatically put into effect in our system by Home Office. This, I feel, is in direct response to Hurricane Ike.

Here in KY, we didn’t get the rain, but we did get high winds on Sunday morning, which knocked out power to some 300,000 people here. The next day when we opened, people bought every car charge and battery we had because they were still without any power. Now today all of our car chargers go up nearly 50%. In fact, every charger, car or wall, in our store is a flat $19.00, when car chargers were $10.00 and wall chargers were $15.00 yesterday. This is hardly a coincidence, and it’s so blatently obvious to our customers. I can’t believe Walmart would do something so totally against their own mantra of Save Money, Live Better. This is more like “Raise Prices, Screw Suffering Customers!”

It could be a coincidence, maybe not. Either way, the timing is certainly suspicious.

(Photo: chasingfun)

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