One of the longest and most pervasive holdovers from the days of the COVID-19 pandemic is not masking, social distancing, or contact tracing in daily life—it is grocery pickup.
Most major grocery retailers have maintained their grocery pickup and online to in-store shopping programs which gained popularity in the years following the pandemic, as customers no longer had to walk the aisles of their favorite grocery chains.
One of the problems that has arisen with the popularity of using pickup-style shopping services is the unreliability of the shopper. By and large, shoppers performing this service for customers are ostensibly doing their best to locate and pick items that are in stock to fill the orders of customers accurately and in a reasonable amount of time.
But there are exceptions to the generally good work done by pickers and in-store shoppers selecting products on behalf of customers.
In a video posted to TikTok by Mily (@_milymoly_), the poster shows that previous Walmart pickers shopping for items in pickup orders were marked as out of stock or otherwise unavailable. While the video has no dialogue, it shows items such as jasmine rice, canned goods, and other items generally lower on the shelves that have been marked as out of stock in their system. The poster describes these as “exceptions,” in her caption.
This is not the first time Walmart employees have been called out for fudging their pickups and marking them as unavailable to customers. Previously, a fellow employee of the department store chain called out pickers for simply not taking time to look for the items in an order before marking them as unavailable.
In that instance, the poster showed how simply moving one item would reveal that the product requested by the customer was simply behind it, or that the item was in plain sight, ready to be picked up by shoppers and pickers alike.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Mily via a comment on the video, as well as to Walmart via contact form.
Some viewers, also current or former Walmart workers, replied to the video saying that they disliked working in exceptions, the position dedicated to sussing out why items have been marked unavailable if the stock tracking system shows there are plenty on the shelf.
@_milymoly_ Doing exceptions was like this everyday. 🙄 #walmart #walmartopd #walmartogp #walmartdelivery #personalshopper ♬ YOU MOTHERF CKERS – Callsign: ᗪ尺卂Ꮆㄖ几 乃ㄖㄚ🐲
“Real i hated it so much it was one of main reason i quit they would always go overdue and im getting in trouble but it would be RIGHT THERE,” one commenter wrote.
“It’s so bad at my store,” another said. “Just today we have over 70 exceptions at one point and 75% was on the floor.”
“Exceptions everyday,” a third added. “I almost tweak every time I see the item, especially when there’s a whole shelf of the item.”
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