Internet OG’s may remember the comedy/online bullying site People of Walmart, which featured a slew of candid photos snapped of real-life shoppers site visitors enjoyed collectively ridiculing and shaking their heads at due to their often bizarre, unsanitary, and sometimes frightening appearances.
And while some of the site’s posts may be considered in poor taste, there was one lesson to glean from the assortment of photos that populated People of Walmart‘s servers: The global retail chain truly was a melting pot.
So it doesn’t come as a surprise as new social media applications, like TikTok, gain traction, that there’s a bevy of Walmart-related content shared among its users, and this week is no different.
Pink Sauce on clearance, but not really.
The Pepto Bismol-looking condiment gained notoriety on TikTok not just for its striking color profile, but for its reports that unlike its medicinal counterpart, it causes stomach aches instead of alleviating them. Although Chef Pii’s concoction became a cautionary tale into how businesses should probably learn to walk before they can run (i.e., if you’re going to launch a food product, focus on consistency and ensuring people don’t get sick from your wares before creating a viral social media campaign), Pink Sauce still managed to nail down a high-profile partnership with Dave’s Gourmet.
This partnership has seen Pink Sauce become available for purchase in Walmart stores, but a TikToker named Beth (@sadstar) uploaded a video showing the stuff on the Walmart clearance rack. Despite its placement in the store, however, it doesn’t appear to retail at a steeply discounted price. Currently, the Pink Sauce sells for $7.78 in Walmart’s online store, which is online with what some commenters were saying in response to Beth’s video.
Abandonment issues
Anyone who works in retail knows the struggle of returning out-of-place items left by the wayside from customers who up and decided that they no longer wanted to purchase them. One Walmart employee called out shoppers who leave entire carts filled with products in the store, however, a shopper pleaded their case as to why folks are justified in doing so.
Marquita (@shoppingbestie) said that she’s done this in the past not because she didn’t have any intention of buying the items she loaded up into her cart, but because by the time she reached checkout, she was either confronted with “long ass lines,” a lack of sufficiently staffed cashiers, and the self-service area sporting a dearth of functioning kiosks.
She went on to say that while she doesn’t leave items that require refrigeration in her cart, while adding that from a consumer perspective, waiting 30 minutes in line in order to give a corporation your money isn’t really a good time.
Flour for Algernon
There’s been a lot of hatred geared toward male personal shoppers for delivery services/pick-up orders from retail chains like Walmart. Oftentimes, customers who’ve made requests for specific items have been left disturbed by the substitutions made by these shoppers for the products they desire. The battle of the sexes notched another talking point in a TikTok uploaded by @alwyzbeenshayla, who specified that she wanted a 2-lb bag of flour from Walmart, only to be greeted with a gargantuan 25-lb one instead.
Some commenters speculated that whoever prepared the order was probably male, while there were others who offered up bits of advice to the woman on how to utilize her newfound abundance of the baking ingredient staple: Launching her own biscuit business. Judging from the responses to her video, it would seem she wasn’t alone in receiving exorbitantly larger amounts of an item she purchased: Other folks said they received huge orders of cheese and rice.
Sub-sidized
One Walmart shopper named Katie (@fluffyotakabunny) shared her hack for getting nearly $30 worth of Walmart-prepared sandwiches for only $1.64. Here’s how she does it: She uses the Walmart app and orders Marketside subs for pick up. However, she asks to be priced by “weight” of the sandwich, and says that users must pick the full version of the sub.
Through some sort of glitch, or just how the application measures the sale of the sandwich, customers are able to get the Marketside subs at a steep discount. Other users had stated that they’ve found success with the hack. Katie adds, however, that this little trick may not work at every single Walmart location.
Jalapeno biddies
There are numerous Walmart-prepared food offerings that have been getting love from shoppers, namely the store’s chicken tenders and egg rolls. TikToker @jen.heifer believes that the store’s jalapeno bites should be mentioned in the same sentence as these offerings, and she marveled at the quantity of prepared cheesy, deep fried, spicy goodness she was able to purchase for $1.05: 7 bites total.
Several other people hopped into the comments section to reverberate the TikToker’s assessment of the item and Walmart’s hot bar foods in general. So if you’ve been debating as to whether or not this is your thing, well, in the words of folks on the app: “This is your sign.”
Inside job
Some retailers take rewards points very seriously, just ask this Kohl’s employee who was fired for accepting a customer’s gift of their Kohl’s cash. While that may seem extreme, as the customer in this instance wasn’t intending on using the points anyway, it’s understandable why rewards theft is considered a big deal: they don’t magically appear on someone’s account and they can be redeemed for cash value at their corresponding retailer.
Which is why TikToker @ohwhenshesmiles was shocked to see Walmart employees scamming customers out of their hard-earned points. She said that the workers scanned her QR code that showed up on the checkout screen after she completed her transaction, and made small talk with her right before doing so, presumably as a means of drawing her attention away from operation stolen rewards. The TikToker went on to say the workers did this with several other customers and that when she complained about it to store management, they ignored her concerns. That’s when she decided to escalate the matter to corporate.
$20 for her job.
Former Walmart employee and TikToker Jasmin (@ccripllinganxiety) said that she lost her job with the global retailer after picking up $20 she found chilling, unattended in the store. Days later, a manager told her that the money belonged to another employee, and she was fired for taking the money she found near a self-checkout kiosk.
She added that she discovered the abandoned cash while she was on her lunch break and was going to pay for her food and responses to her video highlighted instances where folks working for other retailers (Kohl’s again), were also fired after finding them in similar situations.
