Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct number of items and orders a customer placed.
A Walmart employee and TikTok user Reese (@r_swaggyt) went viral after showing the sheer amount of online orders that stockpiled at his store after just one day of the retail location he works at being closed.
Reese shows in the video that a whopping 428 items were placed during the location’s single day of closure during the week, and he showed his frustration at having to ‘pick’ them all by lip-syncing an ‘oh, my god’ in the four-second clip. He clarified in the comments section that there were over 800 items to pick before he filmed the short clip.
@r_swaggyt #fyp #walmart #onlinegrocery #viral #holidays #nostaff #shorthanded #christmas #chrismaseve ♬ original sound – $
He writes in a text overlay of the TikTok, “Like y’all need to chill grocery shopping like dang we closed one day!!”
Viewers who said that they were Walmart employees shared in his anger, and they questioned the purchasing habits of shoppers as well.
“Like why are customers buying the whole store ? They don’t give us a break,” one user wrote.
Another penned, “‘oH wHy ArE tHey MakinG u WorK toDaY?’ oh can i get 27 cases of water and q6 gallons of milk.”
Others quipped that delivery customers have unrealistic expectations of the amount of time it takes to receive an order they place through Walmart’s website.
As one user wrote, “then they get mad when their order is late, nobody ain’t tell you to order 20 totes worth of groceries,” while another said, “BRUH i’ll go to dispense it and they’ll be like ‘omg i can’t believe they make you come outside when it’s like this’ IM ONLY OUTSIDE FOR UUU.”
Some Walmart employees responded by saying they receive upwards of 5,000 items to pick in a single day. The number of orders was so consistently high at one location, according to one TikToker, that their store had to suspend delivery orders and cancel them entirely as they couldn’t fulfill them in a timely fashion.
“Girl we had 8k the other day & our norm is like 5k we didn’t have enough people that had to shut it down & cancel the orders,” they wrote.
The surge in delivery orders from Walmart may have been spurred by the retailer’s decision to drop the $35 minimum on express orders, an initiative the chain announced on Mar. 1, 2021. Tasting Table reported in June of 2022 that the retailer was looking to compete directly with Amazon’s grocery delivery service.
This appears to be a byproduct of the massive download increase of the Walmart Grocery app that occurred during government-mandated stay-at-home and social distancing orders placed during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Walmart via email and Reese via TikTok comment for further information.
