I've always liked Walmart and, for the most part, that will not change, but the management at this store SERIOUSLY dropped the frigging ball tonight!
Sorry if it's obvious that I was a little pissed about this, but...
Tonight we were here for the Thanksgiving Day Pre-Black Friday Sale. Yeah, we were reluctant about it, but we needed to start working on Christmas gifts for my 3 year old daughter and my 8 year old nephew and if you want the deal, you gotta move when the deal is out there, but that's really not the point of this.
So, the sale is advertised to start at 6PM, but they started letting people in before it was even 5PM. We got in at about 4:45-4:50.
We shopped for about half an hour, there were plenty of other shoppers who got in before us and it's safe to say that probably most or even all of us who had a shopping cart had something in it. I guesstimate that there were probably 200+ of us in the store at this point.
All of a sudden, at around 5:20, a female employee starts grabbing stuff out of my cart and says something like "I'm sorry sir, but nothing can be put in the carts until 6 and these have to go back on the shelves until then."
Then, 2 more employees start grabbing stuff out of my cart and I'm feeling very WTF and asking why the other 10+ employees we had seen and/or interacted with in the last 30 minutes or so had said nothing about the growing mass of toys in our cart. I don't recall anyone answering my question, but the answer soon became obvious.
I think we were probably the first customers to get hit with this and, in the midst of it all, I see a manager walking toward me with a walkie-talkie, directing the employees to empty everyone's carts... And that's exactly what happened.
As expected, the reaction of the other shoppers to employees yanking goods out of their carts was similar to or stronger than my own and it is a good thing that those reactions didn't get out of hand.
At the same time, employees were also passing the manager's command on to their co-workers by walkie-talkie and by yelling to each other. This was when it became painfully obvious that (The answer to my earlier question) the management of this store had not communicated to their employees that no items were to be taken from the shelves before 6, until now.
I get it. Start the sale at 6, let the folks in early so things are ready to go on time and smoothly... Yeah, communication breakdown is a real smooth move, Ex-Lax.
In retrospect, I guess one could argue that we all should have known, but the simple fact is that we just didn't and it was the job of the management to make sure that the employees knew to keep the shoppers from prematurely loading their shopping carts, obvious or not. This store's management clearly made an epic fail tonight and is very fortunate that this failure did not cause a riot in their store.
I gave one star to this rating, because I consider this to be an isolated incident and I have no other complaints about this store. Also, there were only a few employees who were total d-bags about emptying our carts and the majority of the staff actually did seem sincerely apologetic about having to do this to us.
I gave a second star to this rating because the management did allow the customers to start loading their carts again 5 minutes early at 5:55. I don't know if this was meant as a goodwill gesture to counter their earlier mistake or not, but it did help a little and people were happy. read more