Today, Walmart Grocery Pickup gave my order to someone else, billed me, and then had to go pick it again while I waited in my car. Bonus: Lawyer says stay away from self-checkouts or you risk jail.

Today, Walmart Grocery Pickup gave my order to someone else, billed me, and then had to go pick it again while I waited in my car.

I’m still trying to figure out how you manage to do that.

You shouldn’t be able to dispense an order until the customer checks in on the app and tells you where to park, then apparently someone went outside and shoved my groceries into a DoorDash driver’s car, and they drove off.

I called 1-800-Walmart to complain, and they issued me a $15 account credit for my next order to compensate me for having to wait for my order to be fulfilled again.

The woman on the phone says she actually gets “a lot of complaints like this”.

Why put up with the problems? Well, Walmart basically pays you off to shop online with their credit card. You get better points with the credit card. Then, I’ve noticed that they’re starting to charge higher prices to people who go into the store.

Shopping for my own groceries actually saves me nothing. They just bill me more for doing the work, and then if everyone did that, they’d shut down the Grocery Pickup department and a dozen and a half people at this one store would lose their jobs.

I don’t like to hear about people losing their jobs. It happens far too much these days. Those people deserve a good job just as much as everyone else does. If you go into the store and shop, and use the self-checkouts, you also put cashiers out of work.

Also, self-checkouts put you in legal jeopardy. A lawyer on TikTok recently posted a video about just how sloppy the store dicks are about reviewing self-checkout shrink. You could end up getting arrested over a trip to Walmart six months ago, where you didn’t even steal anything.

It’s like Hertz Rent-A-Car reporting customers who brought the car back on time for felony car theft, and then going “Tell it to the judge!”.

It’s not a situation you want to be in. Richard Stallman mentioned that you should avoid the self-checks and walk straight over to a cashier because of jobs. That’s a very good reason to do it. You should also do it so that store dick doesn’t put you in jail all weekend waiting to speak to a judge, where you’ll have to hire an attorney and prove you didn’t “steal that XBOX game several months ago”.

I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say I believe the lawyer over Walmart, which didn’t even bother to give a response to any of the articles that repeated her accusation.

Can you really afford to be in jail over something you didn’t even do? I can’t.

The state already tried doing that to me once a few years ago (not even going into the traffic ticket I had to beat again here) and I’m not going to give them another shot at it.

In America, you’re theoretically innocent until they prove everything like 99.9% of the way, but in reality they just arrest people and arm wrestle the guilty and the innocent alike into plea deals.

They file the worst charges they can as a form of extortion and blackmail and tell you you’ll agree to something or it will “only get worse”, like the Communists in China, and as many charges as they can, and then the prosecutor starts going “Nyaaah! Nyaaaah! Lookie what I got!”, and you just don’t want to be in this situation if you can avoid it.

So don’t give them the opportunities, and definitely don’t talk to the police if it ever happens.

I not only stay away from self-checkouts, I stay out of the whole damned store. Honestly. No shit!

The attorney in the video even said paying in cash at a self-checkout works against you because then there’s no credit card receipt you can use in your defense, so it pressures you to use credit cards and identify what you’re buying to advertisers. Google buys this in bulk, so does Facebook.

In Lake County, Illinois, we have a Democrat Prosecutor. It’s made absolutely no difference in how nasty the prosecutor’s office is, and the Republican who lost the election is just an unelected tyrant in a black robe (judge) now.

As soon as I saw the video of the lawyer, I said, “Okay, I’m going to heed her warning. I’ve never stolen anything, but I don’t want some sadist cop smashing my face into a parking lot pizza and knocking out my teeth on the way to court.”.

Free, high quality, legal advice is always worth taking note of. Hopefully, enough people have seen her article that Walmart will give up on self-checkouts and pay more cashiers, then we’ll have more jobs, and fewer people facing charges because store dick is throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Here’s an article about the video so you can read it without going to TikTok:

Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle)

I’m going to say when I worked my first time at Walmart (there were two, spanning three stores) from mid 2003 to Spring of 2006, we were told that a “shoplifter” was anyone who “takes unpaid merchandise past a point of sale”. They didn’t mention whether you thought it was a mistake or not.

I won’t go into all of the policies because I don’t want thieves to get away with something that costs us all a lot of money when we do our shopping there, but I can say that even the employees don’t know who Loss Prevention is, and the company has its eyes on the employees more than the customers.

The local Walmart is losing so much money to customer theft that they often have off duty police standing right there waiting to arrest shoplifters as soon as it happens. They call the off duty cops “Sigma”, and they’re watching for customers trying to walk out with big TVs and stuff without paying, so you shouldn’t expect to make it far past the register.

As for small stuff, yeah, people do it.

The problem is that the city I live in is so corrupt and full of felons and other ne’er-do-wells that the store loses millions to theft, and they are VERY pissed off about it.

So pissed off, in fact, that they just take it out on the Store Manager every year or two and fire another one.

During the riots in 2020, “Burn Loot Murder” was out stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down at the Round Lake Beach and Gurnee, IL Walmart stores and they had to shut the one my spouse works at down, block the doors with pallets full of water and stuff, and have the police guard it. It must have been the only one in the county that wasn’t destroyed and picked clean. BLM even had the fire sprinklers going off and flooding the store out in Gurnee.

I have to say I was honestly terrified. The BLM rioters went through this side of town setting people’s cars on fire and looting the grocery stores and strip malls. They even looted a Popeye’s and a Ross Dress-For-Less.

It was horrific. And of course, there were emergency sirens everywhere and civil defense broadcasts on the radio, but the Governor (Pritzker, a Democrat) didn’t call out the National Guard.

I was worried that the lawlessness would continue and we’d lose our home if they had to shut down the local store my spouse works at. It got really bad here.

For six months, my renter’s insurance company at the time, Lemonade, cited “civil unrest” as the reason I couldn’t change anything on my policy.

But that was the only time I’ve ever seen riots break out or was truly fearful about, you know, everything.

There was no political will in Illinois to restore order. There was no order again until the riots burned themselves out a few weeks later.

BLM figured out how to make everyone I know lose sympathy for them.

“Come into my neighborhood. Threaten to burn my car. Vandalize and loot the store my spouse earns his paychecks at.” It’s like, “F**k right off.” You know?

The riots managed to distract everyone away from police misconduct and put their focus on what might happen to them if the riots keep breaking out.

Insofar as companies get in “a really bad mood”, I suppose that could be why Walmart is now lashing out at everyone over self-checkout stuff.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the majority of people who go through the self-checkout are innocent, shouldn’t have to be dealing with law enforcement putting them through the legal system, and are just having to pay because bad things are happening in America (year 3) and the (global) economy is ruined.

Like I said before, I think going back to the 19th century approach of telling a store clerk what you want and having them go get it is probably the best.

(More jobs. Safer…. no legal liability because you were never in the store doing anything….so where would their case come from?)

When that system changed, people had complaints much like they did about self-checkout today.

“What? I’m supposed to walk through here, find everything I need, and do unpaid work for the store?”

Everything old is new again.