Walmart has been in an experimental mood of late—and it’s not testing anything that will benefit its customers.
In fact, a couple of things they’ve been testing out, like surge prices, are openly hostile to its customers. The latest hostile move the retail giant has been testing out with a pilot program at select US locations is body cams. That’s right, Walmart is outfitting its employees with bodycams like they’re cops.
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They say it’s to enhance employee safety, especially during this hectic holiday season. And the company assures people that it is not doing it as a method of reducing theft. Even though that’s the reason some major retailers have recently started outfitting their workforce with body cameras.
Walmart Employees Outfitted With Body Cams
Even that claim is, in itself, pretty dubious as the recent corporate freakout over shoplifting is largely bullshit. Mostly because these retailers have confusing and piss-poor definitions of what “shrinkage” is. That’s the term used to describe the general loss of products that results from tons of stuff—from theft to food rotting before it’s sold. Even local law enforcement in cities with supposedly high retail theft have a hell of a time figuring out exactly how these retailers are defining shoplifting.
Major retailers, from Walmart to Walgreens to Target, are almost single-handedly responsible for states and cities passing big sweeping laws regarding retail theft based on little to no actual publicly available data. It’s all just vibes fueled by some persistent “trust me, bro” messaging from major corporations.
For instance, for all the freakout around the idea of San Francisco being a hotbed for shoplifting, a spike in shoplifting at a single Target location in San Francisco accounted for nearly all of the increase in theft across Targets in the entire city. The shoplifting epidemic is not a problem, in other words, yet Walmart, despite what they say, is hanging cameras around their employee’s necks in an attempt to solve a shoplifting problem that’s happening at about the same rate as it’s always been.
No one is sure how many Walmart locations have employees wearing body cams. But you know you’re in one when you see a sign somewhere within the store warning customers that there are “body-worn cameras in use.” People have identified at least one Walmart participating in the pilot program: a location in Denton, Texas. Denton is a small town about 40 miles north of Dallas.
However, it’s still just a pilot program. So maybe the body cams won’t get rolled out nationally. Only time will tell.
