I (26F) went to Walmart last week to pick up a pretty large grocery order, and I’m still stuck thinking about how the situation played out.
I used the self-checkout like I normally do. After scanning everything, my total came to around $278. Everything seemed fine at first, but then my card just wouldn’t process. No matter what I tried, it kept declining. A staff member came over to help, tried reprinting the receipt, and even attempted to move the transaction to another machine, but nothing worked there either.
Eventually, things escalated into them deciding I’d need to be checked out at a regular register instead. By that point, I had already scanned everything myself and bagged it all, so the items were packed away.
What was supposed to be a quick grocery run turned into almost 45 minutes of back-and-forth. There was confusion, multiple failed attempts to fix the payment issue, and honestly I was already pretty frustrated and tired of standing there.
When we got to the register, the employee couldn’t find the original receipt they had printed earlier. Instead of using that, she just decided to rescan every single item from scratch.
I even offered to unpack everything myself to make it faster, since I had already bagged it all at self-checkout. She refused my help pretty sharply and insisted she would handle it.
The way she went about it felt rushed and disorganized. She was grabbing items quickly, scanning them without really checking anything carefully, and just pushing through the process as fast as possible.
After she finished, the new total came out to about $183, almost $100 less than what I had originally scanned myself.
I paused and asked her if she was sure she had scanned everything properly. She looked annoyed and told me she had checked it and everything was included.
At that point, I was exhausted, there was a line building, and the whole situation had already dragged on way longer than it should have. I didn’t push further and just paid and left.
But now I can’t stop thinking about it. I knew the total seemed off compared to what I originally scanned, but I also wasn’t sure if arguing more in that moment would’ve changed anything or just caused more chaos.
So now I’m wondering… AITAH for not correcting it further and just leaving once I was told everything was accounted for?