A WALMART customer talked about their frustrating shopping experience, which brought to light a problem that many buyers have: checkout lines that close at the worst times.
Carroll Dee Tilghman wrote a late-night Facebook post about a trip to Walmart that didn’t go as planned.
After putting goods in her cart, Tilghman went up to what looked like the only open register in her North Carolina store.
But someone else with fewer things walked in front of her before she could get there.
What came next upset Tilghman was angry.
“The guy on the register looked at me and said she would be his last customer,” she said.
“lol,” you read the next line out of anger.
Because Tilghman might not have been able to check out, she chose to leave her full cart behind and go home.
She was angry, but she kept her cool, Tilghman said, and told the checker she would “see him tomorrow.”
“He told me he would be back on Monday,” she said he said without thinking.
“I said okay and left,” she said.
Even though the post seemed funny, it was really about a problem that a lot of people can relate to: not having enough open registers, especially when it’s busy.
People have been complaining more and more about how few checkout lines there are at big-box stores like Walmart in recent years.
Self-checkout systems are becoming more popular in stores, but some customers still prefer the human touch of traditional registers, which means they have fewer choices.
Tilghman said that Walmart was “not my place,” so this event was especially upsetting for him.
People who are also shoppers and have been through the same thing saw the post and commented on it.
A lot of people who left comments told their own stories about long lines and closed mall registers.
“People are so rude,” one reply said.
Someone else said, “They need to hire more people.”
Many people even said they “understand” and have done the same thing when they wanted to leave the store with nothing in their cart.
One more person said, “Walmart has gone bad.”
“Really bad,” they said next.
Latest self-checkout changes
Self-checkout is changing as retailers try to cut down on theft and speed up the checkout process.
People who shop at Walmart were shocked when self-checkout lanes were made available only to Walmart+ users in some places.
Other customers said that self-checkout wasn’t available at certain times and that more cashiers were available instead.
People thought that the changes were caused by shoplifting, but a Walmart representative said that store managers are just trying out new ways to make the checkout process faster.
In a strange experiment, there was an RFID-powered self-checkout kiosk that would get rid of the highly disputed receipt checks.
But that test run is no longer being done.
At Target, self-checkout is getting less space for things.
In the fall of 2017, the brand looked at new express self-checkout lanes in 200 shops with 10 items or less to make things easier.
This rule has been added to 2,000 shops in the US as of March 2024.
People have also seen that at some Walmart shops, you can only use the self-checkout machines if you have at least 15 items.