They call them “hand-baskets”? Cause that sounds awkward.
Walmart have people who stand near the exits, checking out your purchase, even occasionally asking to see your receipt and writing a check on it in pen. The purpose of this is to make sure no one is stealing, or forgetting to pay for stuff on the bottom of their shopping cart. At some Walmarts, the customers form a cue at the exit as their stuff is checked.
Now we’re being told the blue hand baskets, which (unlike the shopping carts) should never leave the store and could even have a security tag on them, routinely get stolen.
Question: what the hell are these “door checkers” checking for if they can’t spot a basket?
WalMart has receipt checkers at the exit where you live? I’ve been in a lot of WalMarts and never seen them. Sam’s Club, always, but not WalMart.
That they are willing to spend money on workers checking people for stolen items as they leave, combined with the employees saying the baskets get stolen, seems to indicate your local WalMart has a lot of theft, including baskets.
Interestingly, the “poor WalMart” near my office doesn’t have baskets, but the “rich WalMart” over by the Costco does.
If the trend is toward bigger baskets, why are grocery carts getting smaller? My grocery store recently went 1/2 traditional carts, 1/2 small carts: they are about half the size of a full cart and have no place to put a kid.
How much can these baskets cost anyway? This is Walmart, who sells better quality, more intricate pieces of extruded plastic for about four dollars. Say they keep a stock of 100 and 5 go missing each day. what’s that like 20 bucks a day. It should be a non issue keeping these in stock…this is Walmart: Discount Purveyor Of Extruded Plastic.
I wonder, too, if they’re requiring us to use shopping carts because they don’t like people dashing in, grabbing a hand basket and walking briskly to gather their purchases. They might feel they have better control if everyone has to get a shopping cart and must lumber up and down almost in a cue.
I’m not sure why they wouldn’t want to enable getting in and out, but it seems they want to put an end to it.
This is a huge problem for some friends of mine that use wheelchairs. They always carry a basket in their lap and secure it to the chair with a bungee cord. A lot of stuff can be packed into those hand baskets.
Pushing a cart from a wheelchair really isn’t an option. My friends ask me to take them to Target now. They can only carry three or four items in their lap at Walmart. It’s not worth the trip. Sams Club is the same problem. No hand baskets. I hope Target keeps their hand baskets.
Add to this:
The WalMart in Citrus Heights CA (likes to think it’s more upscale than it is) no longer offers the white bags for your purchases. Or any Free bags. It is now BYO or buy the upscale blue woven plastic (has to be seen to be believed) at $2-3/ea.
I moved out of the area just when the did this (2009). I was back in the area and decided to see if they were still doing it. Yep. Asked the young woman at the door about free bags, and her response was “we’ve never had those”. Yo, twit: the duration of your employment is not the same as the operation of that store. Try “never in my experience!”.
Yeah, but remember they’re making a profit selling Discount Extruded Plastic for $4 whereas the shopping baskets the company itself has to pay for are walking out the door for free.
I searched for “shopping baskets wholesale” and according to this site theyappear to run anywhere from US $2-$5 a pop. I’m sure Wally World can get them cheaper because of quantity so we’ll use the low end of the spectrum. So losing 5 baskets a day hits them for $10, which isn’t a big deal, but the problem is they’re down to 95 baskets… then 90… then within a couple weeks they ain’t got no stinkin’ baskets.
Combine that with every store in the area losing a similar quantity, so the manager has to go through corporate to order more baskets, which the company has to spend money on, just to have the fresh batch stolen again within a few weeks.
I can see why they’d say “fuck it, just quit supplying the baskets.”
Actually, it can be done but it requires a fairly strong wrist/grip on one arm and the other arm does all the pushing.
I’ve heard they’re this generation’s equivalent to the milk crate. Since you can get slapped with a fine for stealing milk crates now they’ve switched to shopping baskets because they’re usually right near the door and store employees aren’t going to go chasing after a basket thief if they see it happen.
Yes, but if you turn a milk crate sideways, it will sit flat and you can use it as a bookcase. That won’t work for the hand baskets.
Well… true that they lack the multifunctional awesomeness of a milk crate, but they do fill the niche of “cheap plastic thing I can steal easily and use to store shit in it.”
Here’s the deal: Walmart isn’t far from work and I go all the time. Even with the parking and the unpredictable checkout lines, I can be in and out in 10-15 min. This is made possible by the hand basket. I can motor in, walk briskly, and even if I need things on opposite sides of the store I can dash and get in and out. Being forced to get a shopping cart makes that impossible. There’s no dashing across the store pushing a basket, especially mid day. It makes a lunch hour (45 min) shopping impossible. They have to know this, which is why I’m wondering if they just don’t want quick shoppers, only shoppers that can spend time and lumber around the store pushing a shopping cart. Another words, unemployed people who have no time constraints.
How is the stealing typically done? When I go to check out, I take my stuff in the bags and leave the basket at the checkout counter. Are all these baskets being taken by people walking in, grabbing one, and turning around and walking back out? The greeter would notice this behavior, I would think, especially since the stack of baskets isn’t (at my Wal-mart) right by the door, and you’d have to make a pretty wide loop to snag one off the stack on your way out.
They want anyone who will spend more money than it costs to serve them. People who steal things screw up that equation, hence no baskets in some WalMarts.
Would they prefer that you buy $500 worth of crap on your lunch break? Probably.
Are they deliberately trying to dissuade you from buying $20 worth of crap? Unlikely. The lights are already on, and they don’t need extra workers to handle your purchase, since they are already serving the lumbering, unemployed crowd.
Is this attempt to reduce losses from basket theft costing them in the long run, since some people like you won’t bother to come in if they have to use a cart on their lunch break? Maybe.
Yea, I question the excuse of stealing the baskets, as they’re large and NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE STORE. Think of something similar size to the handbaskets, bags of dog food.
Would they decide to no longer carry dog food because it keeps getting stolen? I mean come on, this isn’t an eyebrow pencil, it’s easy to see and unlike the dog food, ITS NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE STORE. They have people at the exits as well as cameras. And they have the option of putting a security tag on the baskets too if they want.
For some reason they don’t want people shopping with hand baskets.
Last time I was in WalMart I’m pretty sure I saw people with those baskets shoved down in their pants.
I’m not so sure. They’ve never really catered to the quick in and out crowd. I’ve stopped trying to do a Walmart dash before work because even though the store is empty, they have one checker (usually the 20 items or less line) and I’m nearly always behind someone with a full cart of groceries. And being Walmart, they don’t see some people stuck behind a huge purchase and send another clerk over. You’re stuck. The self checkout is closed early in the am.too.
Think of what a retailer who wanted to cater to the “on the way to work” crowd would do to facilitate quick in and out. Walmart does the opposite.
People in this thread have some serious misconceptions about the quality of your typical Wal-Mart employee. Like I said previously, I used to work there, so I can tell you straight up: not one of the hourly employees really cares about the store. They work there because it’s one of the only hourly jobs that gives you benefits; they don’t develop any sort of bond with the store, because they don’t really have a stake in it. There is a huge, almost class based, divide between the salaried management and the hourly employees. The salaried managers tend to treat the hourly employees like shit because, not only is there a high turnover rate among hourly employees, but most stores employ upwards of a hundred people, so everyone tends towards cliques that don’t socialize outside of their group. So the managers group together and the hourly employees from the same departments group together and there isn’t any real communication going on. The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.
Besides that, there’s a general attitude among the hourly denizens there of “fuck this store.” In order to elucidate this point, let me tell you about Bill. Bill was a professor who taught Greek, Latin and Italian at a university. Bill was married with several children. Bill was also mentally ill. Bill tried to kill himself and failed. Bill’s wife divorced him and the university fired him. Bill had to pay child support. Bill now works at Wal-Mart because that’s the only job he can find. Bill is jaded. Bill doesn’t care about Wal-Mart because he feels life has gypped him out of what he deserves.
People greeters, in particular, tend to be elderly folks who are only there because they need a source of income to supplement their SSI. They don’t care if people steal, because fuck it, they’ve lived their lives and will be dead in a few years anyway. Most of them talk to the speedy checkout cashier girls and make crude jokes. Do you people understand the type of personality that is required for the people greeter job? It is one of the most degrading jobs out there. You get paid maybe, if you’re lucky, a dollar above minimum wage and have to say things like, “Thanks for shopping at Wal-Mart” or “Welcome to Wal-mart”. If you had to do that day in and day out, you would quickly develop a ‘fuck it’ attitude.
So, when a customer at the speedy check out (and let’s be clear: NO ONE PAYS ATTENTIONS TO THE TWENTY ITEMS OR LESS SIGN IN FRONT OF THE SPEEDY CHECK OUT, GODDAMNIT!) loads up their bags into the blue baskets and walks straight out the store, no one really cares.
Most people, also, don’t understand during, say, a Sunday rush, how incredibly busy cashiers are. I know from experience, if I have a line of, say, six or seven people and the parking lot is absolutely packed, I will do anything to get people out of my line as fast as possible. If, for instance, a customer handed me a coupon for drain cleaner when he was buying a window cleaner of the same brand and he seemed like the type who would bitch about me not taking it and demand to see a manager, I would just type the coupon in and leave it at that. Also, if I just checked out a customer and saw him pushing his cart towards the exit and saw a few items underneath the cart I had forget to ring up, I wouldn’t really care.
That was awesome dissection of the low wage, service industry cohort.
Even if a greeter did give a crap about people stealing baskets, would they start something over it? Tell the wrong guy that he’s not supposed to take a basket, and wind up on the floor. For an elderly person, a broken hip can be a death sentence.