Walmart told me I had to haul 215 lbs + of groceries back to the store to fix a failed checkout. Enter: Malicious Compliance.
The relationship between Walmart and me is one of those toxic, on-again, off-again things. We go way back, even before I spent 6 years working for the beast and its affiliate. We officially "broke it off" in 2012, but recently, they pissed me off so much that I’m on a hard break and cheating with other stores to my heart’s content.
What caused the break?
They handled an accidental transaction walk-off so poorly that I had to restrict their access to my wallet.
On Thursday, I went shopping and hit the self-checkout. I usually use WalmartPay, but that day I used a physical card and apparently miskeyed my PIN. Believing my receipt was on my phone like usual, I headed out. Nobody challenged me at the door. I loaded up and drove home.
The next morning, I realized my mistake when I saw a declined transaction notification on my banking app.
Being an honest person, I called that specific store's customer service to fix it. Their brilliant solution? I needed to load up all the groceries from my house, bring them all back to the store, and rescan them.
I asked if they could just look up the aborted transaction on their end. "No." They didn't care that my haul included 80 lbs of cat litter, 50 lbs of cat food, two 5-gallon bottles of water, and a bunch of groceries.
Here is the logistics issue: Fridays are my Mondays. I live 27 miles from my job, and the Walmart is another 30 miles out. I work in healthcare now; my time away from work is precious down-time. I was absolutely not doing a 60-mile round trip, outside of my normal commute, on a work day just to carry heavy crap back and forth.
By the time my shift ended, I had devised three alternatives to their absurd request.
I walked up to the customer service desk after work. I explained the situation and asked one more time if they could look up the transaction log. Again, "No."
I was prepared for this. I had spent hours piecing together the subtotals from each department down to the penny based on my shopping list, reconstructing exactly how much ginger and red onion I bought so the subtotals would match perfectly once taxes were applied. (Sometimes my OCD is a literal superpower).
The Customer Service Representative looked at my itemized breakdown and said, “I don’t know how to do that.”
I asked for a manager. She radioed a manager over the walkie but completely failed to explain my actual question. The manager blew it off, and I wasn't allowed to speak to them.
Fine. Time for Option 3: Malicious Compliance.
I grabbed a cart and went shopping all over again. I re-loaded 130 lbs of heavy pet supplies, the two 5-gallon water bottles (42.5 lbs each), and every single grocery item on my list: some frozen, some hot, some sold by weight.
I pushed the massive cart through checkout, paid for it successfully this time, and hauled the cart and the receipt back to customer service.
"We're square now," I told them.
While one associate was making a copy of the receipt, another mentioned that the self-checkout associate from the day prior had been in tears over the walk-off. Look, I wish I had the emotional bandwidth to comfort her, but the incompetence due to lack of training had pushed me into pure "let's get stupid" mode.
They handed me back my receipt, and I turned to walk away.
The associate yelled, “Wait!! Don’t forget your stuff!!”
I looked back and said, “This isn’t my stuff. This is your stuff. My stuff is at my house. Good luck putting it all back.”
The absolute cherry on top? Because I was rushing, my dyslexia grounded my OCD superpower, and I accidentally misrang the water bottles as refills instead of exchanges. The new receipt was $13 short of the original total.
I didn't bother trying to fix it. Consider it an incompetence tax for making it SOOOO hard for me to do the right thing.