Walmart Super Center Malabar Sams Club Walmart’s Store Scanner Scam Operation Palm Bay Florida

Walmart’s poorly maintained scanning machines break down frequently. The store on Malbar Rd in Palm Bay, FL has around 20 self checkout scanners. Typically, several are broken down and can not be used until a staff member fixes them. Also when you are checking out the scanner may fail several times.

I will describe how Walmart is using these scanners to scam customers. It is impossible to verify your shopping list while in the store. So I have documented this several times by using my phone with an app to scan bar codes.  I phone scan with the bar code app every item so that I can check it with my store grocery list and my actual bought products when I get home. I especially take photos of each scanner failure I get on check out.

When scanning a buggy full of groceries you do not get a running shopping list to see each line item as it scans. Yes, an amount does appear on the scanner display, but in the end you may have scanned hundreds of items with no written record. It is not till you actually pay your bill that a detailed list is printed as your receipt. And who can look at a list of all the purchased items and tell if it is correct or not? 

At least at the Palm Bay Malabar store, the receipts are always illegible and faded, so even with a receipt it is nearly impossible to verify your list is correct. This is why I got the phone bar code scanner app. In addition the Walmart list only has ten characters in the descriptions along with an unusable  number. By comparison Publix, a competitor grocery store, has a 20 character product description. And their ink is always dark black and clear.

This means that even if you could read your faded and obscure list receipt, on many products you would not be able to tell what they were or if they were yours and you paid for them. For example “Bread” is pretty clear, but what is “FF CL C&L”, or “CHRM ESOF GM”, or "PT DCD TOM", or "SUET", or "25.6Z MH BR", and so on. Most of the description you can not be match to what you purchased, except maybe by the price if it is unique and you remember it. On one receipt with 38 items, I could barely read, but I only found 9 items that I could actually identify.

What this means is that Walmart can and does not have correct receipts. They can very easily (the larger your order the easier for their scam)  charge you for items you did not purchase and you never know. After all what is a few cheap items on a list of 150 items purchased totaling over $150 or more?

When the scanner fails to scan an item, it locks up, and a Walmart employee comes over to fix the problem and rescan the item. I started taking pictures of these failures as often your shopping list will have the scanned item twice. and with an obscure illegible list you would never notice it or even be able to figure it out.

As a result of Walmart being exposed I am sure a couple of things will happen. First they will discover a supply of ink of finally put it into their scanners. And second they will shortly stop allowing self checkout. But,  I have found that these problems currently occur both on self checkout and store checkout.