A viral TikTok showing a Walmart shopper purportedly bagging her items without scanning them has divided opinion on the app.
The TikTok appears to have been posted by user @goooseman5 on Feb. 7 and has since amassed nearly 200,000 views. The clip, which shows the customer bagging items without scanning them, appears to have been taken on a security camera inside the grocery store. According to the TikTok’s description, the user is an employee in the store and was the one to catch them out.
“When people think we don’t got cameras at the self checkout,” the caption reads. “She thought she could get that employee discount.”
In the background of the video, the user can be heard exclaiming at the items the customer is taking without paying, such as an expensive cut of meat.
The TikTok also includes tags like #assetprotection and #lossprotection. In retail terms, the practice of asset prevention or loss prevention refers to a set of actions taken by the retailer in order to preserve a store’s profit, avoid stock going missing and prevent the store from making a loss.
However, a number of users took the customer’s side, claiming that this is the consequence of getting customers to do labor. “That’s her fee for doing the checkout for you,” one commenter joked. Another added, “That’s owed to us for working. We are not paid employees.”
A third user said that “stores kind of asked for this when they told customers to ring their stuff up, without paying them to do so.” But not everyone agreed with this line of thinking. Responding to the aforementioned comment, another TikTok user asked mockingly, “How dare stores expect customers to do the right thing?”
“She literally chose to do self-checkout. She could’ve gone to a register,” another user said in response to those defending the customer. A commenter responded to this by saying, “See, that’s where you’re wrong. They deliberately put out minimal staff to force people onto self-checkout.”
Other comments seemed to criticize the TikToker for putting the customer on blast, with one user saying they would have pretended not to see if they saw someone stealing. Several other users questioned whether it was possible the TikToker got it wrong and that the reason the customer wasn’t scanning was because of a discount deal.
The user and members of Walmart’s communications department did not immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment via TikTok comment and email respectively.
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