Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the Walmart workers who will do customers’ jobs for them even though they technically shouldn’t be.
TikTok user Chris (@bigbossbz), a self-identified Walmart worker, said that he met a woman who was dead set on having him scan her items for payment.
There’s just one problem with her request: The woman was in the self-checkout line where, you know, customers are meant to do this job themselves.
It’s not that Walmart employees won’t offer assistance to customers. Chris, for instance, said he told the woman that he was happy to show her how to use the self-checkout machines.
But that wasn’t enough for the customer in question. She insisted that she didn’t “want to learn” how to use Walmart’s self-checkout stations and preferred that a worker scan her items for her.
It’s not immediately clear from Chris’s initial post whether the woman figured out the self-checkout herself or moved to a regular checkout line. Chris said, though, that plenty of regular checkout lines were available to customers.
Of course, it’s not like every Walmart employee will be a hard-no as Chris was. Some employees might be happy to help customers scan their items at the self-checkout.
But Chris wondered: If the woman wanted an employee to do the work for her, why did she go in the self-checkout line?
“She’s like, No, I don’t want to learn. I just prefer for someone to do it for me,’” Chris recounted. “And I said, ‘Well, I do apologize, ma’am. But what I can do is I can scan a couple of items. That way I can show you how it’s done.’”
Toward the end of his clip, Chris shared a PSA to Walmart guests. If you can’t check out your items, then you don’t need to be at the self-checkout station.
“You need to go through [the] regular register,” he added.
Beyond the woman whom Chris encountered, other shoppers have similarly reported issues with Walmart’s self-checkout stations.
In one instance, a shopper said that the store’s self-checkouts were only available for Walmart+ customers. Others have taken a stance similar to the customer Chris met: They didn’t think it was their job to check out their goods. This is particularly notable, in part, because some other retailers are operating entirely via self-checkout.
Some reporting suggested that some stores are rethinking their self-checkout stations, however. That’s because they’re noticing an uptick in shoplifting. One study of retailers in the U.S., Britain, and other European countries found that companies with self-checkout lands had a loss rate of roughly 4%—almost double the industry average.
According to CBS News, some stores have tried to combat this by increasing self-checkout security and adding weight sensors.
But it seems like some Walmarts are eliminating self-checkout scanners. In October 2023, the store announced that the self-checkouts at three of its New Mexico locations were being removed.
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