Walmart Shipped Five Packs of Harry Potter Plates Separately — the First Arrived on Party Day, the Rest Did Not

A Reddit post about a couple who ordered 40 Harry Potter plates from Walmart for their twins' seventh birthday party — only to open the box on party morning and find a single pack of eight — has gone viral on r/mildlyinfuriating.

According to the post, the Harry Potter theme was the twins' choice and the family had committed to it fully. Since the plates were sold in packs of eight and they had 40 guests coming, five packs was the straightforward calculation.

The box arrived several days before the party and they left it unopened — there was no reason to check it early.

Morning of the party, they opened it. Under all the packing paper: exactly one package of eight plates.

The order was split. A second package was already scheduled for delivery, and it was expected to arrive before the guests. That one had to carry the rest.

The second delivery brought another eight plates.

"At this rate we should get them all in a couple of weeks' time," the poster wrote.

With only 16 plates in hand and 40 guests expected, three more packs were somewhere in transit with no confirmed delivery time.

One commenter described ordering twenty storage bin lids from Walmart: "I got twenty deliveries all in the exact dame day. A few drivers delivered twice but it was like 9 different delivery drivers. The sheer amount of wasted labor. Walmart has no idea what they’re doing haha."

Another commenter described an Amazon grocery order split into individual items per bag, writing, "I thought I had it bad when I ordered groceries from Amazon. One grocery bag just had the bananas, another had a single container of blueberries, the next had an apple…"

Then came the comment that reminded fans of an image from the books: "Speaking of Harry Potter, this sounds like the mass of letters flying in."

Complaints about Walmart splitting multi-unit orders into separate shipments have circulated on Reddit and customer review platforms for years — the company has not publicly addressed the practice.

The Reddit thread is still gathering responses — with commenter after commenter adding their own Walmart and Amazon shipping stories to the pile.