> Huynh claims Walmart ... failed to process customer returns
I've had this exact experience. A car seat I returned was "lost" when I shipped it back. It took me 6 months to get a refund, and it was only because I pinged an exec there and he facilitated the refund.
Front line phone customer support was useless in a Kafka-esque manner. I didn't think it was nefarious, but as much as I want competition for Amazon, the thought of buying from Walmart makes me feel like it's going to be a painful ordeal.
I work for walmart ecommerce. There are some legitimate reasons for their issues. I could talk about them in depth (turns out when you crush the competition with the world's best logistics technology you end up with a whole bunch of systems from the 70s/80s that are hard to update). Walmart was literally using the internet before most companies even knew it was a thing, and unfortunately their internal network reflects that. Another example is inventory management and sales reporting. When these systems were built there was nothing like them in the world to centrally manage inventory and availability and create feedback loops. But in 2018 going to the back office to get a 100 page printout generated by a mainframe once a day hurts more than it helps. It's like we climbed mount everest and got farther than anyone before us before building a camp, and now we're kind of stuck in it and by the way people have found even better routes since then.
But anyways, customers don't care. It's not their problem. I've had orders cancelled for no real reason so I just give up and buy it on amazon. I've had search so bad I can't even find what I'm looking for so I just give up and buy it on amazon.
And I'm somewhat incentivized to want to think the shopping experience is good.
In mid-November, I bought a Christmas gift for my son (a drone) on-line through Wal-mart.
The text on the Wal-mart web-page urged me to purchase now (to guarantee on-time delivery).
The shipment of the drone was fulfilled by a 3rd party.
I got the drone in early December, wrapped it and my son opened it on Xmas day.
Drone didn't work. Out. of. the. box.
I asked for a refund, and Wal-mart customer service told me to pound sand b/c the product came from a 3rd party that had a 30-day return policy (no exceptions).
I know I'm a drop in the bucket, and I may not always be able to avoid Wal-mart, but I told them I would do my level best to shop elsewhere.
I've noted that people quickly advise others to issue a chargeback as a resort to "win" against a company that has supposedly "wronged" them, even in cases where the company fulfilled its contractual obligations and no fraud whatsoever was committed. Here's a word of advice: do not issue a chargeback against any company you ever want to do business with in the future.
While this is arguably less a problem with WalMart - issuing a chargeback won't get you banned from their physical stores - a chargeback is especially something be avoided with every vendor where you have an "account" of some sorts, except if you don't care about being banned (permanently).
The examples are numerous. Issuing a chargeback against car rental companies can put you on their DNR (Do Not Rent) list[0]. Issuing a chargeback against Amazon may result in a permanent ban (including loss of access to your Kindle library and even your AWS account)[1]. Issuing a chargeback against Sony for a purchase over PSN may get you banned from PSN[2].
That's good information to be aware of, but chargebacks should never be the first recourse, and often at the point in time when the consumer is pursuing a chargeback, they likely want nothing more to do with the offending company, anyways.
Can't they simply point to the policy, which you agreed to, and contest the chargeback? It's not a magic policy to get your money back because you are unhappy.
> Holders of credit cards issued in the United States are afforded reversal rights by Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act. United States debit card holders are guaranteed reversal rights by Regulation E of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. Similar rights extend globally, pursuant to the rules established by the corresponding card association or bank network.
No only that. I had what i thought legitimate card fraud but the problem was my card wasnt stolen and even worse - the chip was used and transaction was on the card. Eventually they got my money back via chargeback process but i found out later it was family-related fraud. Point being for 90 days my score went 10 ponts down and the credit card record was annotaded with message about this questionable chargeback. they could not believe it was true fraud.
Honestly, it never even crossed my mind to ask for a chargeback.
The number of times that I've had issues over the years is pretty small. For example, I think I've had two issues w/ Amazon over the years, and both times, they've fallen all over themselves trying to help. I think one time, they shipped me the wrong item, and they told me to just keep it and they would ship the correct item.
Service difference between the 2 vendors was like day and night.
Not too late to do a chargeback if they still haven’t refunded you. And will send some sort of signal in walmart’s internal systems. Companies track chargebacks.
Yea and amazon can resolve the issue without even having to talk to a human. The only time I have talked to an amazon employee was via email after I requested access to an ec2 instance(which felt weird, I wasn’t sure why it was so “exclusive” that I had to request access. Do they say no?)
That's pretty bad. A few years ago I ordered a big TV from Newegg around black Friday as a Christmas present. I got it a few weeks before Christmas. When Mom opened it Christmas day the screen was cracked out of the box. I hopped on with Newegg support and they asked why there was a long delay between order and damage. I explained it was a gift we just opened and they apologized then replaced it.
I think the big online retailers have realized that a good return/RMA policy is key to their continued success. If Walmart wants in on this world they will have to figure it out too.
You couldn't contact the manufacturer? They probably would have a warranty unless they are a Chinese white label product. There's also credit card benefits that may apply, return protection and extended warranty. Then there's also the aforementioned charge back.
Why wouldn't one always be able to avoid Wal-Mart? Hell, I'm sure I'd have a hard time giving up Amazon (which seems harder to avoid online), but it's really just a habit that would be difficult but not impossible to break entirely. Actually, moreso, because Amazon has worked it's way into so many facets of our lives, where Wal-Mart is far more limited online, and with physical stores, you've always got a choice.
WRT always being able to avoid Wal-Mart, in less populated areas when a Wal-Mart opens if there's any local competition it's generally decimated.
When in the SF bay area I never shop at Wal-Mart. On the SF peninsula you have to go to the south bay or over a bridge just to find one last I checked, there are plenty of options.
But after spending winter in a rural area, it's been quite surprising the number of times I've found myself in a Wal-Mart to buy household goods simply because there's no alternative. And boy does the quality of their products _suck_, it's pretty much a store 80% full of garbage, the stuff is so bad I experience buyer's remorse just looking at it on the shelves.
> in less populated areas when a Wal-Mart opens if there's any local competition it's generally decimated.
Or never really existed to begin with.
I have lived in towns where, before Walmart came in, there was nowhere in town to get certain things. You had to drive over an hour to the next largest town to find a store, and that's hard in bad weather.
I would be surprised if Walmart accepted open box drone returns at all. My local electronics store does not. It makes sense too. I've bought two drones and both died quickly due to collisions. Maybe there are drones that are stable and easy to fly, but the product category seems designed to eat money. I lost interest after the second one.
> turns out when you crush the competition with the world's best logistics technology you end up with a whole bunch of systems from the 70s/80s that are hard to update.
I hear Walmart makes much use of AS2. A means of transmission that I have had a lot of exposure to over the last few months (and absolutely no exposure to before this). While I think there were definitely some forward looking aspects to AS2, it's relative obscurity outside of very specific verticals and the fact that seemingly every COTS platform that implements it is overpriced and many years or even decades old (and feels like it) has not made my AS2 journey very pleasant to date.
So I just wanted to say: my condolences to you. :P
Well, that's documentation for PeopleSoft, so it's Oracle the company, but not necessarily backed by Oracle the database.
And to paraphrase the old quote, if you're having a problem sending messages between two systems, and you try to solve it by setting up an instance of the PeopleSoft Integration Broker, you now have a larger number of problems.
Not really. They seem bright but I don't think their competencies have much overlap with walmart's problems, at least from a technical perspective.
[edit]
I'd like to revise my answer. I answered your question thinking in terms of systems integration. However it's quite possible Mark Lore will be a much more effective CEO than the person he replaced.
A guy in my office ordered a 60-inch LCD TV. They delivered. Two weeks later another arrived. Customer service wouldn't acknowledge the first, so now he has two.
I once ordered a notebook from Amazon and ended up getting a phone case (they sent a replacement). Bizarrely, the original notebook arrived the following week, so I ended up with two notebooks and a phone case.
This doesn't surprise me at all. The last time I was actually in a Wal Mart I had an employee yell right at me when I asked to get by their carts in the way. I complained to their corporate, expecting at least a call back. I got nothing. No phone call, no emails, nothing. They really do not care apparently. So I refuse to spend any $ there ever again.
Sam Walton once said "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else"
But does anyone really think that they still follow this advice? Wal Mart has a well deserved terrible reputation.
Ultimately Amazon will eat them if they don't compete on customer service. Amazon is still being run by their Sam Walton, with Bezos obviously being obsessive about trying to make customers happy (although I wonder more recently if he isn't likely to lose focus, spreading himself & Amazon way too thin). That's of course why even huge companies tend to die and or fade given time, it's nearly impossible to maintain the founder fanaticism that got the business to the top of the mountain in the first place.
Very similar experience. I only ever end up in one when visiting relatives. I'd be surly if I worked there too, and totally understand it. Still makes for a miserable place to go.
And on a purely visceral level, what gets me is that the stores all stink. Seriously don't understand it - I'm guessing it is some cleaning product - but jesus, they all smell terrible.
I had similar with Amazon - returned item was lost, and I was told that I would receive the return when they get the item back. Difference being that it only took one more email, saying that you have proof of postage/tracking number, to get a return and a £10 gift card as an apology.
Not sure why that was was different to begin with though - most returns they process as soon as the item is shipped (i.e. before they get it back).
"The term "Kafkaesque" is used to describe concepts and situations reminiscent of his work, particularly Der Process (The Trial) and "Die Verwandlung" (The Metamorphosis). Examples include instances in which bureaucracies overpower people, often in a surreal, nightmarish milieu which evokes feelings of senselessness, disorientation, and helplessness."
One of The Onion's best skits is a about a very "Kafkaesque" business.
> Business Week rated Franz Kafka International among the worst airports in terms of customer service, calling the employees completely indifferent to traveler's needs. "If there is as problem, fill out complaint form and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born."
I've tried one and only one time to speak to someone at Google (not for adsense). At that time I was trying to recover an old email account that had been unused for awhile. I was perfectly ready to just create a new account but still wanted to try to get at an email that I thought might be inside this account.
I was 100% ready to smack into a brick wall of non-responsiveness after I sent an email from a different account to their tech support. What actually happened was a live person called me back from Google and gave me access to the old account on the spot - despite my not remembering much about the account itself (date I opened it, name I registered it under, etc).
That resolution was practically out of the twilight zone...
> Front line phone customer support was useless in a Kafka-esque manner.
Isn't that just how online retail works these days? Once you find your way through the menu tree, you get to talk to a person who sort of speaks your language, over a bad connection that will probably cut out in a minute or two, and who is paid to deflect. If it matters, you'll try to cause a Twitter storm. Otherwise you'll give up.
I called chewy.com because I forgot to apply a coupon code on an order that I placed 30 seconds before. They answered the phone, spoke English well, and had no problem applying the coupon code to an existing order for me. Quite nice.
Yes. And Amazon isn't that much better. Last night it took me a full 10 minutes to get someone at Amazon on the horn. And you can't call Amazon. You can only request that they call you.
I don't know anything about this lawsuit, but the reason their growth in this most recent quarter went down so much is very simple:
They raised prices for online orders. Now stuff you buy online is not the same price as you get in the store, I used to buy a lot of stuff from them for delivery, now I don't.
I personally wouldn't mind slower shipment and lower prices. But I guess that's a hard sell in today's world.
Their online growth rate went down so much in the most recent quarter, because they rolled year over year past the acqisition of Jet.com. It's an issue of YoY comparables.
"Walmart's e-commerce sales growth in its U.S. business slowed to 23 percent during the fourth quarter, a sharp decline from 50 percent in the third quarter. It noted last year's results got a big boost from its acquisition of online retailer Jet.com."
> I personally wouldn't mind slower shipment and lower prices.
I think that would be expressed as an option for "combine my shipment with a bunch of others going to my neighborhood until there is a full tractor trailer load, or 30/60/90/120 days elapsed, and pass the savings onto me", because ground shipping is already available and about the slowest available standard shipping. Solving that logistics problem would be a strategic advantage, as it becomes a hairy optimization problem but with big savings over time, and offering this option opens up supply chain planning strategies that are now closed to us.
$7 million doesn't seem material enough to warrant a big conspiracy theory. And purposely mis-categorizing a few items to screw vendors of a little commission? Unlikely. These both seem like genuine issues of fast growth.
They may be genuine issues of fast growth. The problem is that, according to the lawsuit, when they were brought to the company's attention as problems that needed a solution, the person who raised the issue was ignored, and then fired. It might not have been deliberate to begin with, but the cover up in firing this guy is a separate matter, if in fact that's why he was fired.
Exactly. The case is not alleging that Walmart is engaging in a broad conspiracy, despite what the title of the article seems to suggest. It is simply saying that the plantif was terminated when he brought up to management that there were issues with how they were conducting business - "Walmart did not properly address these issues, its failure to do so could have serious long-term implications for its critically important e-commerce business."
>Wal-Mart sacrificed and betrayed its founder’s key principles of integrity and honesty, pushing those core values aside in its rush to win the e-commerce war at all costs.
Markets left to their own accord incentivize dishonesty and manipulation.
Innovation is only one way to compete, and a rare one at that. It’s one to be treasured, not defended on disgraceful terms like that of how both Amazon and Wal-Mart are content to treat their employees.
> Markets left to their own accord incentivize dishonesty and manipulation.
That is not the takeaway from this. The enemy of a corrupt, shady organization is an open and transparent market with lots of consumer options and stock researchers drilling deep into their numbers.
Sounds sensible, but how does one ensure that the "lots of consumer options" part holds? There seem to be quite a few sectors with winner-take-all dynamics (e.g. social networking), and quite a few other sectors that under many conditions tend toward oligopoly or monopoly (e.g. insurance, banking, credit history reporting).
>Markets left to their own accord incentivize dishonesty and manipulation.
Only among the narrow minded & short sighted. Companies that view things like customer service as a cost center rather than customer retention & profit center tend not to experience as much success as their all-else-being-equal competitors. It's a PITA to return something to Walmart Online, refund are slow and sometimes nonexistent, requiring lengthy exchanges and delay. Amazon makes it easy, and is one of the primary reasons I long ago made them my first and, when possible, only stop for shopping online.
The solution isn't magic; it's simply "don't leave markets to their own." Markets are regulated in many ways, the most painfully obvious example of which is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, mentioned in the article.
I don't trust almost anyone, but democratic process ensures that politicians at least have to pretend to care about some of the people who are affected by their decisions.
I don’t understand this mentality. Every sufficiently large collection of people in the history of the world has had taxation. The evidence suggests that taxation is necessary to have a functioning society. Reasonable people can and do question taxations levels but not on the necessity of having taxes. It is unreasonable to consider taxation theft.
It's libertarian extremism. It's simply the reverse of communism, where the taxation level is 100%, and the state provides everything. Under this model, the taxation level is 0, and the government provides nothing.
I actually have a hard time thinking the other way around.
> Every sufficiently large collection of people in the history of the world has had taxation.
That's not really an argument in favor of taxes, many things have existed for a long time. And many wars were fought purely or most importantly on taxes: most of the american revolutions of independence were largely about taxes or tax-like sanctions.
Taxation has always been a contentious topic.
> Reasonable people can and do question taxations levels but not on the necessity of having taxes. It is unreasonable to consider taxation theft.
There are many arguments and school of thought within libertarians and anarco-capitalists. I'm no expert, but the taxation is theft argument does have nuances.
Taxation IS theft, because it is involuntary, and unless you concede the tax man a privilege over yourself, he is stealing from you. To me this is a non-negotiable concept: you are one way or another being forced to give your labor under threat of liberty.
But the reality is there are ways in the which theft can be justified, the same way we tend to forgive a robber that eats for sustenance, theft can be justified to pay for the military that gives you freedom in exchange of their lives.
You can eliminate taxes 100% if you made contributions voluntary. This is utopic in today's world, maybe, but not in the next world, the one we get to design and work towards to.
Who-would-pay-for-roads is as dumb a meme as taxation-is-theft. I complain about taxes all the time, but I wouldn't complain as much if the publicly funded roads I drive on most weren't absolutely shitty and if the snow removal that's part of my local government budget was actually done anywhere near where I live. I wouldn't complain as much if my state wasn't going into debt for the next 70 years to do upgrades and talking about charging tolls for other upgrades. I wouldn't complain as much if any significant percentage of my taxes were actually going to roads, and not political agendas, pet projects, wars on drugs and unauthorized wars on brown people who don't like our foreign policy. And I wouldn't complain as much if I didn't have to spend days and hire professionals to figure out how much I owe the road makers. Fuck the roads.
It’s not a meme. It’s a proper question to those who decry taxation as theft. Without taxation who would pay for government services? Your complaint about the road system indicates that taxes ought to be higher or are currently misallocated. The ire is not at the concept of taxation it’s at the allocation and level of taxation.
The fact that a government agency fails to provide the services you're taxed to pay for does not mean they should get more money. I pay far higher taxes where I live now than when I lived in an openly socialist country that had better roads, faster police response times, better (and universal) healthcare. Every time I dig into specific government projects the amount of waste and corruption is disgusting. Wanting to throw more money at it is stupid, and the burden of proof is not on the people who want to be taxed less that it's actually doing anything.
You apparently missed the “or are misallocated” part and completely missed the point of what I wrote. It seems like you are doing some projecting. My post does not in any way imply a “throw more money” attitude. Also, the original statement I responded to was an attitude that taxation is theft. It was not a statement about whether or not taxes should be reduced. Indeed, in my first post I specifically mentioned that reasonable people can and do question taxation levels.
I have complaints about the roads in the area where I live, and also how my taxes are spent.
If I didn't have roads in the area where I live, I wouldn't complain about it, I'd leave.
There's a pretty big difference between these two situations. It's easy to focus on the bad side of taxes, but it's important not to forget that they pay for some very basic stuff that shouldn't be taken for granted. There are plenty of things we would disagree about spending taxes on, I'm sure, but it's rather silly to pretend that you disagree with the existence of taxes completely when in fact you depend on them.
You may have noticed that I'm not saying taxation is theft. I'm saying I'm against the massive portion of government spending that I think is rank with abuse, waste and misuse of power. I actually spent several days in the last year looking into what my property taxes are supposed to be paying for at the county level and exactly none of the services are being done near my property, except for one, and that one service complains about not having enough money even when they get massive bumps in their budget - no matter what they ask for, when they receive it it's not enough for them to fulfill their obligations. Taxation in general - no I think it's necessary one way or another for our society. But I think the vast majority of it is wasted without enough accountability or integrity. But I guess I can always vote against the people doing, right? Yeah that's working great. But it's just justified with, "but we have to have roads."
I wonder what would happen if we allowed everyone paying taxes to dedicate a small percentage to a field they feel is important and underpaid, e.g. by choosing a category like education, road infrastructure, social services, military... for planning reasons this could be done a year in advance.
Would that make people feel more agency and ownership in their nation? Or would it produce (small) chaos?
Wouldn't change my feelings much because it doesn't do anything to address my current problems with the system. I would bet the same amount I pay in taxes that all it would do is increase the demand for money by agencies without any increase in accountability or thriftiness.
The one rule that annoys me the most in local tax spenders is how you cannot give money back to the state that you don't need that year, because then you will get less next year as well since obviously you didn't need it. At the end of the year you can see employees spend money on the most ridiculous things since they have to spend it all. At this point I think it's because the money is not meant for their task at all but rather to stimulate the (local?) economy, and that is not done by saving.
I'm not sure how the rules would have to be changed to allow for giving money back (and use it to pay for state debt, but that is probably not politically wished for either), since there most probably would be side effects. Still, this rule.. (Germany, but I've heard about others as well)
Does somebody know why this rule exists?
At some point I complained to a state minister at some election thing, but I think he was too drunk to understand since he kept saying he didn't know what I was talking about and wanted to know who is doing this thing.
Yes, the parent comment was equally stupid. Parent comment doesn't wage the longest war in US history without ever voting on whether or not to wage it, make me pay for it, and then blame roads.
I think if you actually listened to the people making the roads argument instead of reacting to what you incorrectly think people are saying, you'd discover that most of them (myself included) oppose US military spending.
EDIT: Given the things you are complaining about, it seems like we're fairly in agreement about how we would like tax spending to be allocated.
It seems like you believe that removing/reducing taxes is more realistic than reallocating spending. It's a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I can see how this is choosing a realistic imperfect solution over an unrealistic perfect one.
In fact, I'd agree with you if you could separate the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation, but unfortunately, you can't. Taxation isn't actually strongly correlated with spending in the US. Historically, conservatives have decreased taxes while increasing spending (largely on the military). If you vote for people who run on a platform of decreasing spending, what you end up with historically in the US is people who cut a few token programs (welfare, for example) and pump far more money into the military than was saved by their cuts, increasing the national debt. The result is that by pushing for tax cuts you actually exacerbate the allocation problems you've pointed out.
>> the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation
Yeah and I think that mismatch is exactly how it's gotten so bad. How is it that we still have "the war", undeclared, after 16+ years? It's because everything is now enabled through whether or not there's a budget for it, and you can pretty much accept the budget or shut down the government, and everyone keeps choosing to just accept the budget and not hold their party responsible for promising shit again.
Alternative viewpoint: traditionally taxation was done by the monarchs/oligarchs because they had the power to do so and in order to secure their position even further. This simply continued into the modern age. The evidence seems to suggest that consolidation and reallocation of resources through taxation is extremely inefficient.
I consider it unreasonable to claim it is unreasonable to consider taxation theft. It happening for a long time isn't a strong enough argument.
Taxation has been done by governments because all governments need money to function. Even in the monarch era localities needed money to run as well. It’s not the case that under monarchs taxes only went to the monarch to further his/her position.
The proper view is that government regardless of political system needs taxation to function. Calling taxation theft is unreasonable because the evidence is that it is a necessary aspect of having a society. It is not theft by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
I disagree that there is evidence showing it is a necessary aspect of having a society, though. What we have is evidence that societies with tax can function reasonably well, not that societies without tax are not able to function.
It is obvious that any system doing useful work needs resources, and money is a fungible way of representing those resources. However, in my opinion, it is unreasonable to say with certainty that taxation is the uniquely existent solution to this problem or even the best one.
Taxation has an inherent element of force to it, taking forcefully the product of someone's labour to redistribute it to other parties. I would say the element of forced redistribution qualifies it for at least some reasonable definitions of theft (albeit a theft with a good intent, under some definition of "good"). In any case, I am having a hard time drawing a clear line between taxation and, for example, Robin Hood-style redistribution, other than the current governments of the world being recognised as a sanctioned, official, good-enough Robin Hood occupying a local minimum.
Another problem of taxation is the well known market inefficiency of the very act of piling up resources in a central place and then trying to allocate them manually to where they are needed. There is plenty of empirical evidence that systems like this tend to swell in size for no good reason other than serving their own existence.
It is typical to label the fiscal year by the date of the end of the period. This distinction doesn't matter when your fiscal year is Jan - Dec, but comes up in this case
If your fiscal year goes from Feb 1 2017 - Jan 21 2018, then that is commonly referred to as FY 2018
> “Wal-Mart sacrificed and betrayed its founder’s key principles of integrity and honesty, pushing those core values aside in its rush to win the e-commerce war at all costs,”
...Integrity? Honesty? This is the same Wal-Mart with the gender discrimination law suit in 2012 and that destroyed Rubbermaid prior to 2004, right?
There should not be anyway to "cheat" Amazon - as Amazon is the 2nd largest company in the world, anything you can do to outwin them should be allowed.
What a ridiculous statement. Especially when what Walmart is accused of doing doesn't "outwin" but instead consisted of lies and fraud against their 3rd party sellers and investors. Ethics & laws aren't relative to market share. Can a slow runner knife the guy in 1st place, because "anything should be allowed" against the current winners?
In this case, it was cheating to beat Amazon by duping customers and investors. Hurting people innocent to the situation is not okay, even if it is in a try to topple a behemoth.
You realize the victims in that case is not Amazon, but customers and investors. Amazon still makes the same sales as before, it's just that your personal 401k is worth a little less now, and people who buy from Walmart get screwed.
I'd say most online shoppers are not the kind of people who would buy from Walmart, and most people who shop at Walmart are not the kind of people who will shop online.
I guess you'd be wrong. "Online shoppers" is most people these days, and Walmart is one of the strongest retail brands around. They don't even have to be that good to compete in online retail. I think you're likely the victim of a very specific perception bubble.
I default to Amazon, but if I don't see what I want in my price range I try Walmart as well. This is probably playing into some stereotypes, but when I needed some thermals for going hunting this last year I first tried Amazon and Cabelas, but their prices were around $10/shirt. Walmart had them for less than $2/shirt. Free 2 day shipping, too!
Generally though—and perhaps to your point—buying from Walmart, whether in person or online, always feels lower quality than Amazon. I don't quite know why, but it does.
In most places that Walmart operates, there are no "Walmart people" and "not Walmart people". There are just people who have to do some shopping, and almost everyone will go to Walmart if it's the convenient place to get what they need.
I've only found a segmentation to be a thing in some parts of California, where governments and municipalities work hard to keep Walmarts few and far between, and relegated to undesirable locations.
The segmentation occurs on most of the West Coast, people will either go to their local Kroger brand (Fred Meyer, QFC), Target or the local supermarket chain, considering Walmart as a last ditch store to get the item they want.
Another oddity is Texas, where HEB and Lowes Foods controls the majority of the grocery market, with Walmart, Kroger and Safeway (branded as Randall's) being higher priced also rans.
I've had this exact experience. A car seat I returned was "lost" when I shipped it back. It took me 6 months to get a refund, and it was only because I pinged an exec there and he facilitated the refund.
Front line phone customer support was useless in a Kafka-esque manner. I didn't think it was nefarious, but as much as I want competition for Amazon, the thought of buying from Walmart makes me feel like it's going to be a painful ordeal.