The greeters aren’t the only ones at Walmart who demand your receipt. If you’ve registered for your wedding or other gift-lavishing occasion at there, know this: Wally World treats registry returns without a gift receipt as returns without a receipt. Even though they’ve got your registry right there, showing that someone else bought the item for you and precisely who bought it. Nope, being a registry item isn’t good enough. Reader Chris shared his sad tale, which ends with him being stuck with an air compressor and an awful lot of Walmart gift cards.

This time last month my wife and I were married. Times are tough, and we decided to keep our wedding registry simple, registering only at Amazon and Walmart. This gave us an massive number of price and quality points for our guest to choose gifts from. We received quite a few items from our Walmart registry, which we went to return last week.

Despite Walmart wanting to appear wedding friendly, they in fact are not. All returned items were treated as if we were returning them without a receipt. The manager, and two other associates just kept asking us for receipts which we explained over and over we didn’t have, and that they were wedding gifts. To be fair, if you combined the age of all of these associates, you probably still didn’t have someone old enough to be married. 45 minutes later once they agreed to take back all the gifts, except an air compressor (to be fair they did total up to around $325, but all of these items were on a registry in the store under our names!)

The only item they refused to take back was an out of box air compressor. The manager claimed under their tool return policy he was unable to accept the item without a receipt (I will now never purchase a tool from Walmart again either.) I was very agitated at this point as I had been here almost an hour, and he was refusing to take back an air compressor. I explained to him I attempted to use the item, the item was on my list, it was just a very poor quality item, and didn’t work as described. In the end they did make an exception and take the tool back, but at the same token it is silly to waste an hour of my time, because you don’t want to link two of your systems together.

Long story short, avoid a Walmart wedding registry at all costs, unless you want a LOT of Walmart gift cards. Returns can only be done in blocks of $50 at a time; all other transactions will take managerial approval IF they choose to do so.

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