Walmart has $681BB in revenue and is an $854BB company by market cap.
Nathan Barton is some guy in Washington state who likes to sue people for calling him.
Not exactly a fair fight.
But Barton decided to spit in Walmart’s eye and took an appeal from a recent order granting the retail giant summary judgment in a TCPA case:
The core of the ruling was that transactional messages from Walmart related to curbside pickup notifications were not solicitations:
I love this ruling since I was the guy that basically invented the transactional message exception back in the old Aderhold case (also out of W.D. Wash.)
Regardless in Barton v. Walmart, Inc. 2025 WL 2977820 (9th 2025) the appellate court issued a summary affirmance of the lower court’s ruling:
The district court properly granted summary judgment for defendants because Barton failed to raise a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether Walmart Inc.’s text messages about orders previously placed on its website constituted “solicitations” within the meaning of the TCPA, see 47 U.S.C. § 227(a)(4) (defining “telephone solicitation” to mean “the initiation of a telephone call or message for the purpose of encouraging the purchase … of … goods”), or “commercial electronic text messages” within the meaning of the CEMA, see Wash. Rev. Code § 19.190.010(3) (defining commercial electronic text message as “an electronic text message sent to promote … goods … for sale”)
That’s it.
That’s the ruling.
And it is fair and reasonable in my view.
But the line between transactional and marketing does remain somewhat mysterious. I will be discussing this and other important topics at the ANA Masters of Advertising Law event November 4, 2025!
Chat soon.