A woman says her elderly mother, who’s in a wheelchair, was singled out by Walmart staff at self-checkout. So she gave him a taste of his own medicine.
What’s the backstory?
In the TikTok that has more than 100,000 views, Angelina Lawler (@angelinalawle) explains that her mom was kicked out of Walmart the other day because she had too much stuff to go through self-checkout.
“I saw my mom come home crying when I got off of work. her feelings were really really hurt,” Lawler told the Daily Dot via message.
The next time she went to Walmart to pick up some items, she says she thought of her mother’s experience. Plus, she says she saw the employee who her mom described was working that day. So she went on a mission in her mother’s name to rile up some Walmart employees.
The revenge
Lawler’s plan was to fill up her shopping cart with as many random items as she could find. Then, she planned to abandon the cart at checkout so that an employee would not have to go through the trouble of putting it all back.
“I’m really not a petty person. I have not done something like this since I was 16 years old,” Lawler explains.
She says she knew the worker who interacted with Lawler’s mom was going to be the one to face the consequences and restock it all.
“Why would they kick out a simple old woman that has a basket full of items?” she questions.
Lawler says she was particularly frustrated because there was no sign in the self-checkout aisle clearly stating the maximum number of items that could be checked out in that lane.
She explains that she chose this harmless vengeance path. She notes that she worked at Walmart before and knows how annoying it is for a worker to have to restock the items a person left behind.
Items in her cart
Lawler fills her large shopping cart with items from all over the store, including:
- A coffee maker
- Tide pods
- Dog toys and snacks
- Stickers
- Wet wipes
- Doggy training pads
- An X-Acto knife
- Chips
- Yarn
- Notebooks
- Pimple patches
- Conditioner
- A hairbrush
- A heavy bag of dog food
- Crayons
At one point in the video, Lawler says a customer gave her mom $60 for the “trouble of having to just wait there,” while an employee sorted out the situation.
When the Daily Dot reached out to Lawler for clarification she said that the person insisted her mom take the money because of Walmart “wasting her time and poor customer service.” “My mom did not want the money, but she gave it back to the guy and he handed it back to her,” Lawler explained.
In her video, when Lawler attempts to use self-checkout, she gets promptly turned away. The employee politely tells her that she’d instead have to go to a register with a cashier.
“What we’ll do is, just like last night they made my mom leave with a big ole’ basket, I’ll leave it right here,” Lawler tells the worker as she promptly walks out.
@angelinalawler ♬ original sound – Angelina Lawler
Why this revenge path?
In a follow-up video, Lawler says that while some people thought her approach was petty, it comes out of a deep frustration with the retailer. In previous instances, Lawler says she has had to call corporate and speak to the general manager of other locations. But this time, she says she didn’t want to “wait for karma.”
“I made my own karma,” she says.
She also implies that the incident was race-related since two other people, who were white, had carts just as full as her mom’s, and they were allowed to go through self-checkout,
“There are a lot of elderly people that are treated incorrectly at Walmart. Not just Walmart, anywhere,” Lawler says. “There’s no other person that sticks up for them.”
What is Walmart’s official policy?
The Walmart website does not list a universal maximum number of self-checkout items. However, various news sources reported that some stores had set limits of 10, 15, or 20 items.
This doesn’t come as a surprise as Walmart has been scaling back its self-checkout machines due to revenue loss and customer feedback. Other large companies, including Target, Five Below, and Amazon, are also reversing course, NBC News reported.
“It’s a very love-hate technology. A lot of customers see it as a deterioration of the service, and they have to do more of the work. So it’s not good for driving customer loyalty, ” Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at GlobalData, told CBS News.
Self-checkout started as a way for companies to reduce costs. They figured buying a machine and paying one employee to oversee the self-checkout area would be cheaper than paying several people’s hourly wages.
They were even more popular during the pandemic due to decreased human interaction. But the machines aren’t proving to be the long-term solution for many brands.
Self-checkouts are notoriously frustrating. Multiple things can set a machine off—like not placing an item in the checkout area after scanning it or buying any form of alcohol—and make it so an employee has to come over anyway to help you out.
Plus, whether on purpose or not, people steal in the process, without about 15% of customers admitting to doing it on purpose, according to a LendingTree survey.
Commenter reactions
“I love being petty,” a top comment read.
“You should of gotten all freezer stuff,” a commenter wrote.
“I worked there for 17 years. The cashier’s do not put it away. It is sorted by dept. and each dept puts away. I actually loved the job of sorting and shelving. thanx for job security,” a person said.
“Myself, my kids and my husband would’ve allll come in to each fill a basket to leave it at self checkout,” another added.
The Daily Dot reached out to Lawler for comment via TikTok direct message and comment and to Walmart via email.
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