I absolutely HATE Walmart. I should hate them for their exploitation of workers, their shit products or any number of their shit corporation’s dealings. But the thing that drew the final blow for me was an incident dealing with their self checkout and their system of ascribing guilt for theft without any due process.
I went to a store about half an hour away from where I lived as they aren’t common near where I’m from. Bought several items including a marker board. Checked out using self checkout. Marker board was too big to fit into a bag, so I set it aside to bring with me after scanning everything. Well, as luck would have it, when I got home I realized I never brought my marker board home but I had paid for it and had the receipt to prove it. I called the store and explained the situation to the manager at customer service who assured me I could come to the store and pickup the item, no troubles.
So I drove back up to the store hour round trip. I get there and the customer service line is about 15 people deep at this point. Only one person behind the counter. After about 30 min waiting in line, I finally get up to the counter and explain my issue, showing the receipt and that I had spoken to a manager earlier and that they said to come in and it would be fine to pickup the marker board. Well, not only was it not fine, but then the woman behind the counter, after having a discussion with her security dept over the phone who “reviewed the footage” from my checkout, decided that I had actually attempted to put something into my pocket to steal something!? Incredulously, I asked her why on earth I would go through the trouble to come all this way back to the store for an item that I clearly paid for along with about $60 worth of other stuff which again, also clearly paid for, if I had stolen something!? She refused to budge and I was honestly shocked she had the audacity to accuse me of theft 100% seriously. I left that store and haven’t set foot in a Walmart since. It’s been 4 years and it’s the best consumer decision I’ve ever made.
I lived with my partner and her parents for a couple of years. At some point her mom started getting more groceries from Walmart; around that time I started having badddd reactions to the food. She doesn’t get groceries from Walmart anymore.
Oh, absolutely. No hate to the customer service woman. I realize she was probably under pressure from the powers that be, but nevertheless, she enforced the absurd policy (understandably, girl’s gotta eat), didn’t make the experience any more palatable for me, however.
I once had a Walmart employee follow me out of the building and start banging on my window screaming at me they’re calling the cops
Why?
I, while using a cane in one hand and the other occupied by a bag of dog food that was making me regret not waiting for a scooter, didn’t stop to chat with the old woman who was arbitrarily checking people’s receipts.
I told him he’s lucky I’m more level headed than most of my neighbors, because he would have been shot the moment he banged on glass and yelled, but if they want my receipt they can go watch the fucking cameras because I have somewhere to be.
Could I have handled it more calmly and with more understanding? Probably. But if you follow me out into the parking lot and start screaming at me, consider all respect lost, all decency dropped. You get back what you came in with.
Literally, the only reason I even went to Walmart is because the pet store I get the good food from had their registers all crash and wouldn’t start back up.
A loss prevention guy followed my sister to her car after dark once, he thought she took something and wanted to check her receipt. she was sobbing cause she thought she was about to get raped. Loss prevention officers are just idiotic jackasses who aren’t smart enough to do anything else.
Not saying it is right, but shopkeepers can legally detain customers long enough to figure out if a theft happened. They have to have a reason to suspect it, though.
Fuck em anyway, I pay for my shit and unless it’s a real cop who might shoot me if I twitch funny, I ain’t stopping for shit.
If they don’t want to pay for cashiers, they can deal with people stealing shit. Walmart especially is a corp on welfare, they have the most employees receiving food stamps and Medicaid than any other company. I don’t really care if the government subsidized megacorp loses money every year, they aren’t providing worthwhile jobs anyway.
It doesn’t matter what Walmart or anyone except Costco (part of membership contract) and probably Sam’s club (contract again) says. Once you’ve purchased it they have NO legal right to inspect and you have NO legal obligations to stop. That being said I know the folks doing that job are not assholes so I will politely refuse and wish them a nice day.
In DC they they have the same type of legal witness called special police. Once one tried to stop me and I refused saying , “Call the police if you think I stole something” and kept going.
I’m not going to be harassed by employees after I’ve legally purchased profucts.
Please note if you are planning on running a scam or sneaking shit out, don’t draw attention to yourself. One law at a time is the rule.
I just smile and say “no thank you” and keep going. There’s nothing they can do unless they actually think you stole something and they don’t have the manpower to detain everyone who won’t stop for their receipt check.
Note though that doesn’t apply to Sam’s Club or Costco or similar, if you’re a “member” there you agreed to the checks.
They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen, though (from a store policy perspective). There’s a reason all these stores train employees “observe don’t interfere”.
so long as the shopkeeper has cause to believe that the person detained in fact committed, or attempted to commit, theft
Shop keepers privilege can’t be used as a reason to detain customers for a receipt check. They don’t have “cause” as they did not see the person concealing anything.
That’s true! Receipt checks can get lost! I was replying to “They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen” though. The “can’t” is a store policy thing, not a law thing.
Even if it is, “loss protection” departments now just track it until they have enough to make a charge stick. What a lot of corpos do is track theft though until they have enough incidents to exceed that threshold. This is tracked via loyalty cards, card numbers, facial recognition, and license plate readers.
It’s part of why masks becoming commonplace during covid was so cool, and the epitome of freedom from that bullshit. But there was a crowd of people who constantly speak against their own best interests in the name of freedumb who said otherwise.
I make it a point to forget scanning half of my shit there. It’s less about self-checkout (I quite honestly don’t mind it all that much), and more about the insane cost of living now.
I refuse to spend $30 on milk, eggs, cheese, bread, and butter.
I was physically restrained by 4 Walmart employees, and convicted based on blatant lies from the LP manager (who legally counts as a “professional witness,” meaning her word is literally law) and a petty larceny effectively bars you from employment for 7 years.
What I “stole?” I was having a bad mental health day and missed a $5 pair of sunglasses on a $2-300 shopping trip.
When the judge started to say “no intent,” she cut the judge off and hollared how she watched me remove the tag “and that’s intent if I ever saw it.” Never mind that the picture SHE BROUGHT TO COURT still had it attached, because PrOfEsSiOnAl WiTnEsS hUrRdUrR.
Yep. Obviously I tried to pay for them and pointed out I spent over $200 like fuck $5, but after she started scrambling and lying in court I think she was probably just bad at her job and desperately trying to get any convictions she could to avoid losing it.
Wage theft is the biggest form of theft by far. The biggest perpetrator of wage theft is, unsurprisingly, Wal-Mart. They have the audacity to call anyone else a thief?
I am so sick and tired of having two people standing right behind me staring over my shoulder as I’m using self checkout at walmart. It makes me never want to go back there. I actually have never “forgotten” to scan anything, ever. Yet these mfs are breathing down my neck at every store, every time I go. Target is the opposite. I swear these LPs (the plain clothes people but with walkies, come on) and workers are next to me at all times when I’m shopping. But then they usually leave me be at self checkout. I guess by then their ridiculously invasive theft monitoring system has determined I’m not a threat or something.
Fuck both of these companies. And fuck them even more for running every smaller company out of business so we have nowhere else to shop when we’re sick of being treated like criminals and sick of being sold garbage at some insane markup.
Or better yet actually have a more than a couple cashiers after 10:00 p.m. Walmarts are massive stores they’re not Buffalo wild wings or IHOP… You can’t run the whole place on one person. Needle dicks
What’s up I’m a employeed, tax paying, US citizen. And I would suggest that anybody take advantage of the limited oversight over the Walmart self checkouts
These cock suckers decided that they would raise the prices on everybody under the cover of inflation. They did this knowing that it would drive people to suicide, it would drive people to be homeless, it would break part families and crush the American dream for so many people but they did it anyway.
It’s called plausible deniability… if you forget something in the self checkout, just be a nice person and say it was a mistake, and they will let you slide most of the time. Worst case scenario you have to go back in and pay. Best case scenario you get a bunch of free steak or something.
This is your daily reminder to steal anything you can from large corporations at every possible opportunity. Got five identical items? Whoops, you only seem to have scanned four of them. Are four of them the brand name, and one of them the cheaper store brand? Shit, it seems you scanned the store brand one five four times. They just looked so similar, after all. How confusing!
All the stories in this thread are ridiculous, not untrue, but very weird.
Product loss is a problem, and can threaten a store’s ability to operate, especially in disadvantaged communities where there aren’t many options for shopping. That said, what the fuck is everyone thinking? Why do people care about like one guy not scanning or accidentally taking one item, you’re wasting more resources dealing with it then if you just ignored it.
The actual solution? Exit gates that open when you scan your receipt, maybe combined with some system that weighs the whole order to make sure it makes sense. Completely automated, no shouting, easy to implement because the technology already exists on transit systems and many other things.
I don’t get why this is a problem, though I’ve never seen anything like this at any nearby grocery store.
some stores are going to that model listed first. Security gates that close when the beeper goes off and doors that are only one direction so you can’t leave/enter from the wrong side.
What you’re talking about would likely cost around 100K per location. Multiplied by 5000 locations, that’ll run them a cool half a billion dollars. Minimum.
The real issue is Walmart (and others like them) eliminated local businesses, which replaced decent paying jobs with minimum wage jobs. Then lobbied the government to keep minimum wages down. This had the effect of depressing local economies, creating scenarios where people have to shoplift basic necessities.
So instead of having massive corporations spending insane amounts of money (or calling the police) which serves to make grocery shopping a dystopian nightmare for everyone, maybe we should consider the root cause of the problem? It seems insane the amount of resources being devoted towards maintaining economic problems.
I once called police about a car theft on a property I managed. We had had footage of the theft, the thieves, their getaway car, their license plates, their entry and exit, their faces visible on every camera. It took the cops two weeks to drop by to collect the footage and take a report, and they looked so annoyed, and didn’t even pretend to care. They straight up told me nothing would come of it.
But if you’re a corporation, they’re all over that shit. Minor shop lifting? Cops are there in minutes. It’s become clear over the last few years who the police work for, and it’s not us, the little people who pay taxes.
Not to be a devil’s advocate but the little people aren’t paying taxes. The top 20% pay the taxes for the most part, the problem is the money in the first place giving too small of a group of people too much say in how everyone lives.
You do realize there are states where there is NO income tax, and everything is funded by regressive sales taxes that hit the poor and lower income brackets MUCH harder?
TX and WA for example.
The ‘little people’ as you so eloquently fucking put it, are paying WAY more taxes than they should, and the ‘fat greedy bastard’ people have accounting teams to prevent that for themselves. What an ignorant take. Fucking christ man stop licking boots and educate yourself.
I almost got arrested there because I dropped my receipt in the Urinal, and they wouldn’t believe me. That was fun. I try not to shop there, but that really cemented it.
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