It’s always weird with shoplifting. Some stores will let you walk right out and not do anything, and others will fight you tooth and nail. The latter recently happened at a Walmart in Texas, at least according to a very exciting viral TikTok video, featuring a whole lot of shoplifting action.
The video is captioned “Spring Cypress and 290 Female attempts to leave WalMart without paying,” which is a pedestrian title at best but you can’t argue with the fact that it gets the job done.
Let’s set the scene: We’re in a Walmart in Houston, in the front area of the store where they keep the carts and vending machines. Two employees in blue are tussling with a woman in a gray striped (not great with colors) dress.
They’re holding back a shopping cart filled with various sundries. It looks like there are some paper plates and paper towels in there. “Let it go,” the suspect says. The woman in blue does not listen.
The woman in gray grabs a big TV box from the cart and attempts to leave. The man in blue is not about to let that happen. As the door opens, he gets in front of her and swats the TV out of her hands. It falls to the floor. A genuine tussle begins.
The person filming says something about not being able to mess “with that big boy right there,” in reference to this heroic WalMart employee who is doing way more for this company than it will ever do for him.
Thieving Karen is persistent in her attempts to get a new TV for free. We are only fourteen seconds in. Karen makes a valiant final attempt to grab the TV but our hero sits on it. He sits on it!
Any rational human being would give up at this point. Just walk out! But she does not. She walks back to the other woman and attempts to show a receipt. Isn’t it a little late for that?!
The receipt works kind of and she starts walking out with the paper plates and stuff, but big hero 7 asks if she has a receipt for the TV as well. “Yes I do,” the suspect says. He again holds back her cart.
Then, just like it began, it ends suddenly when she gives up, receipt in hand. I don’t have all the facts obviously, but the ol’ fake receipt ploy is pretty common. And if she legally purchased all of that why is she trying to take individual items and run? Watch the video in all its glory below.
The video almost has 5 million views, more than 154k likes, and 13k comments. Most of them praise the employees for trying to help. Others say they worked in retail and were told not to interfere. One person said the video is the “reason the world’s collapsing.”
Maybe the fact that Walmart is one of the biggest corporations in the world and pays all its profits to shareholders and forces employees to burden our social safety systems because of low pay and no benefits, but sure a woman stealing a TV, yeah. That’s the problem.
By the way, let’s take a look at crime trends around the country and see how prevalent theft actually is. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, motor vehicle theft is up by a lot and theft is down from last year.
It should be noted that this data comes from 37 major U.S. cities and is not necessarily indicative of the United States as a whole. Until next time!