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!
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.
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.
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 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.
There’s this old man who goes to my Walmart. On 3 separate trips, I’ve seen him standing snug against the candy aisle with both his arms in the shelves opening bags. I don’t think he realizes how obvious he looks lol.
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 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.
I love that self checkout used to be convenient and quick, but now it’s lower, way too many people trying to use them because they can’t pay people, and you still even have to deal with someone on the way out of the store anyway. Really glad that’s how stuff has evolved.
yeah i love the i just need 2 things, this is faster, and then now its the norm, like where are the profits going to come from if you have no customers?
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
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.
The scales. I bring my own bags and you have to tare the scale against your bags before you can start scanning and it only works right about ⅓ of the time. So someone has to come set it for me.
If I don’t bring my own bags inside, my only option at self checkout is plastic. Paper bags are offered by cashiers. I like to know my bags can actually be recycled.
Self checkout is constantly populated by old folks who would have had IE jam packed with garbage toolbars 15 years ago. They can’t work self checkout any faster than they could have waited in line.
There is a 25 item limit. I see people with 40+ items in self checkout all the time. It just bogs down what used to be a fast thing.
Finally, the biggest reason I stopped using it is because part of the cost of my groceries is to have a worker to ring me up and another to bag my stuff. By using self checkout, I’m saving the store owner money. I am being the customer and the worker. This is my way of fighting back. If the cost of my groceries is going up, I’m going to make sure that someone else has that little bit of extra job security. If we all stop using self checkout, they have to keep more cashiers on hand. I don’t think I have to explain how more people having more available hours to work is a better societal alternative.
Personally I’m in favor of extreme automation like self checkout. The real issue is that the workers don’t see the return the buisness owners do. Like imagine if we had UBI + good unemployment and then it wouldn’t really be an issue. Walmart would have to compete with people going home
Then when you do move fast (I always do because I’m impatient af) a crowd of employees will gather behind you because they think you’re stealing. No, I’m just stressed that I had to watch all these slow fucks take their sweet ass time scanning their shit.
I don't recall there being a item limit. Which is unfortunate because the people who have boatloads of carts and their carts already loaded. They're the most fucking slowest ever that they even give old people a run for their money. Slowly raising items to scan. Slowly putting them in bags. Slowly paying. Slowly moving the fuck out of the way as they try navigating a heavy cart with all of the junk that they'll barely like as soon as it gets home.
There used to be pretty clear signage about item limits that were ignored anyway, and now they don’t have real cashiers, so the item limits either doesn’t or functionally doesn’t exist.
I don’t think I have to explain how more people having more available hours to work is a better societal alternative.
It’s only better if a human cashier can do the job better. Otherwise, you’re just making humans do money-work as an excuse to give them more hours.
For example, I could do everything at work on a pad with a pencil instead of using a computer. I would certainly have more hours!
The reason why that sounds insane is because everybody recognizes that using a computer is much faster and more efficient, so you should use that instead.
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