Nothing screams “holiday spirit” more than scouring Walmart’s stripped-bare shelves for hours looking for gifts, only to get to checkout and find that only a coupl of the dozens of available cash registers are being used. That’s when some shoppers go “screw this” and pull up Amazon on their phones or just tell their kids that Christmas is cancelled because of Walmart. To keep that from happening this year, the nation’s largest retailer is promising that each of its registers will be staffed from Black Friday through late December… at least some of the time.

Walmart’s under-staffed checkout lines are a source of trouble for the retailer during the holiday season. Big W can lose holiday shoppers to other stores that might have higher prices, but where paying doesn’t require standing in line while glaring angrily at all the unopened registers. The retailer could also lose regular customers who are just trying to buy groceries, only to find that their bananas have gone bad because the wait was so long.

So to appease everyone, Walmart pinky-swears with its new “checkout promise” that it’s going to dust off all those unused cash registers and speed people through the checkout process.

Of course, Walmart isn’t giving hard and fast times and hours for when exactly it plans to live up to this promise, telling the Wall Street Journal that it will typically be on weekend afternoons, but that it will vary from store to store.

It’s that’s the new definition of a promise, then I pledge I will give up drinking beer for the rest of my life… mostly on weekday mornings, but it will vary from day to day.

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