If we can all learn anything from the experience of Joe’s wife, it’s this: don’t use self-checkout lanes if you’re planning to get cash back from your debit card. There’s a slim chance that anything will go wrong, but if it does, you have a witness to the transaction in the cashier. In the case of Mrs. Joe, she asked the self-checkout for $40 that she didn’t receive. She ultimately went to the manager on duty, who reviewed the security video and supposedly found no evidence that the self-checkout shorted her $40.

Joe writes:

My wife recently flew to [redacted] to visit her father who was recently diagnosed with lymphoma. A few days into her visit, she drove to Walmart to pickup a few items to make dinner for her family and walked up to one of the self checkout lanes (as we normally do…). After scanning all of her items, she requested $40 in cashback from our debit card. The machine spit out her receipt, but no money. She immediately went the customer service person standing by and asked for her $40. The person told her that they couldn’t give her the money, but would go get the manager on duty.

The manager says “We’ll have to review the camera footage to see what happened and then if we can see that you didn’t take the money, we’ll get it for you.” Ok, so basically guilty until proven innocent. So, my wife sat for 45 minutes while the manager and several other employees “reviewed” the video. Finally, the manager came out to say “Ok, the video was inconclusive, we can’t give you the $40.” Of course my wife is a bit disgusted at this point, but won’t take no for an answer. Finally the manager says “Ok, fine, we’ll count the till overnight and it we’re $40 over, we’ll call you and get the money for you. Otherwise, we will not give you $40.”

Fast forward to next day…. no call. My wife calls several times and finally around 4pm the manager says the till was even and they will not be giving her the money that they charged her for. This is absolutely ridiculous that the video that they supposedly have on those machines couldn’t prove that their machine malfunctioned and it just happened to work in their favor.

Needless to say, her trip to see her family was good and really seemed to do wonders for her father’s mood, but Walmart put a dark mark on the rest of the trip.

My wife works in the mortgage industry and I work for the US government, both jobs that require substantial background checks and generally positions that require us both to be trusted with much more important things than $40.

Any idea what we can do about this? I’m absolutely dumbfounded that they just said no and didn’t seem to care at all about the whole situation. I just can’t believe that they would be willing to lose a family of customers (we used to visit at least twice week) over this $40.

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