Walmart — Local services in Cheltenham Township

Portions of letter sent to Walmart CEO

Dear Mr. McMillan:

Most recently I went to Walmart on Saturday, June 9. When I arrived at the cash register at 8:13, I took out my own bags. Now I have noticed a development since store plastic bags were eliminated. Ever since, cashiers have typically not lifted a finger to help bag. There is no rationale for this, as nothing has changed except who supplies the bags. Plastic bags were banned for ecological reasons, and you will agree that having the cashier do the bagging as they have done since stores existed, makes no difference to the Earth's ecological balance. Rather, the cashiers are seizing on an excuse to eliminate that part of their job, and you should not be allowing it. It is also an issue that the customer has to spend a matter of minutes first putting all the articles on the conveyer belt. By the time he is finished the cashier has rung up many items and just piled them up willy-nilly wherever she found space.

I asked my cashier point blank if she was refusing to help. She remained intractably silent. When I asked for her name (the badge was covered up) the silence continued. Another cashier happened to come up and I asked her to get me a supervisor. A young woman came and she and the second cashier stood a few feet from me and had a conversation. I could hear the supervisor say angrily, "If someone says they won't bag, there is nothing I am going to do about it." I half-thought she was going to cite their God-given Constitutional right.

When the cashier returned to where I was, I asked her to say to the supervisor that I wanted to talk to her. Hearing me, the supervisor shot back, "I am not going to talk to her. She heard what I saId. " She began walking away. I called out that I wanted her name. She said nothing. What is your name, I repeated. She was walking away from me, with her back to me, and did not even bother to turn around. "1-800-Walmart," she flung at me defiantly. It was the verbal equivalent of giving me the finger. She was daring me to do something about her attitude and triumphant in her knowledge that there was nothing I could do. She stalked off, obviously so very proud of her victory over me. I don't know why this woman was hired in the first place; someone with hiring power is a very poor judge of character.

Your Wyncote store has always been the worst Walmart at which I have ever shopped. The employees have always been unhelpful, sometimes sullen or bored, and the impression one gets is that the labor pool from which you hire is made up exclusively of unmotivated high school dropouts.

Clearly the environment at the store has changed. The employees act this way because they instinctively sense they will be able to get away with it. They are clearly right. It is important to understand why that supervisor felt she could treat me with the most profound disrespect--obviously it is because she was sure nothing would happen to her. And I am certain nothing has.

Does...

This Walmart is going down hill. It used to be a better environment and had what I needed each month. Now that they are getting more business they never have enough cashiers. When the cashiers are there, they dont want to work. I had 2 cashiers close their line as I was about to get in the line and both of them had their lights on showing they were open. The Customer Service Manager or Floor Runner could only say sorry. After waiting 30 min in line, sorry should not be the answer. Do better, accept it, document it and make a change. Show compassion for the customer. Next, every month they always seem to run out of food and household supplies and their prices are incorrect in the frozen section. There is also a lot of false advertisement on the shelf a lot of the time. Nobody wants to wait in line for 30 min and then wait in customer service line for another 20-30 min for 20 cents each time. This is how they get over on the customer. Then shelves are normally half stocked with products. I have shopped at different times of the month and it seems to be a trend to have products constantly out of stock. They need a better grocery and product ordering system. For products that are high sellers, they should know by now to order more and stock them regularly. When you don't keep up with customer demand you lose the sale and have upset customers.The one good thing I like is that the store is outside the City so no Beverage tax but they can do better here. They constantly run out of Diet Coke and Coke products all the time but always seem to have Pepsi products in stock. As a regular customer I expect better service and I shouldn't have to travel to Willow Grove to get it. Walmart please do better. If not I will...

The cashiers are always on their cellphones, especially in the 20-items-or-less express lane. They use their phones right in front of the rude managers/coaches, even when there's a line that's 20 miles long. The experience is consistently unpleasant. The cashiers do not say "hi" when approached or greeted, and I do not feel welcomed here. It feels like I'm interrupting their texting or talking time.

This establishment doesn’t provide bags, so there's no need to take all the items out of the cart, place them on the belt, have them scanned, and then place them where the bags used to be. The customer is left to individually take each un-bagged item and put it back in the cart, which is time-consuming. I’ve already waited in line forever because the cashier was on their phone, not scanning the products with any urgency.

To speed things up, I politely suggest to the cashiers: "Scan the items while they’re in the cart with your scanning gun. If you don't want to get off your phone or are too lazy to walk three steps, I'll do it for you so you can stay on your phone." There's no reason to place scanned merchandise in the former bagging area if you're not bagging the items. It’s a waste of time and money. When I make this request, they display an attitude, like, "How dare you ask me to work at my job? Can't you see I'm on the phone?"

On top of dealing with rude cashiers, they have customer service hosts checking receipts for un-bagged items. Since they no longer provide bags, I’m not wasting another second showing my receipt while they scan for every overpriced item I had to endure purchasing. Ask your cashier who’s on their phone if I paid for my items, because you’re not...