Walmart says some customers were overcharged due to technical issue

If you’ve recently used a self-checkout kiosk at Walmart (WMT) , and felt like your bill was abnormally high, (even amid inflation) then you were probably right. The retail giant has just admitted that it may have overcharged shoppers who opted to use self-checkout machines in March at 1,600 stores across the nation due to a technical issue, according to documents that were seen by Bloomberg News.

The documents reveal that the issue began on March 19, and that some customers were even undercharged for items across all categories such as food, apparel, etc. The source of the malfunction was due to an “internal system failure” that halted price data from being updated at self-checkout kiosks. Walmart’s tech staff were still tackling the issue two days after it started.

TheStreet has reached out to Walmart for a request for comment on what caused the technical error and how many customers were affected, but has yet to receive a response.

Walmart did confirm with Bloomberg that customers who were overcharged were charged an average of 1.88% of the total amount of items that they were checking out at the machines. The issue has also been resolved, and 80% of customers who were overcharged for items have been reimbursed.

The revelation comes after Walmart reported a 6% increase in revenue during the first quarter of 2024 a week ago, compared to the same time period last year. The company also managed to rake in $108.7 billion from net sales in the U.S., which is a 4.6% increase from the same quarter in 2023.

Miami, Hialeah Gardens, Fla., Walmart Supercenter, self-service checkout customer scanning and paying.

Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images

Walmart’s technical issues with self-checkout comes during a time where the company is beginning to remove self-checkout lanes from its stores amid rising retail theft.

In April, Walmart claimed that it was removing self-checkout lanes from select locations in Ohio, Montana and New Mexico, and was replacing them with “traditional lanes” in an effort to “improve the in-store shopping experience.”

In March, Walmart even began restricting self-checkout use by reserving self-checkout lanes for either Walmart+ subscribers or Spark delivery drivers.

Retailers have been shrinking the amount of self-checkout lanes in their stores after industries faced $112.1 billion in losses due to shoplifting in 2022.

According to a recent survey by LendingTree, 15% of consumers have purposely stolen an item at self-checkout, and only 33% were caught. Also, 21% of respondents said they’ve taken an item accidentally while using self-checkout, and 69% kept the item anyway instead of returning it.

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