Customer Got Fired From Walmart Without Ever Working There — Then the Five-Year Update Got Even Funnier

A man who stopped at Walmart to grab office supplies said he was used to being mistaken for an employee. At the time, he worked selling solar panel systems, and his work outfit did not exactly help.

Khakis. Blue polo. Work bag.

That combination was close enough to the retail uniform universe that customers sometimes asked him for help while he was shopping. He did not mind much. If he knew where something was, he would point them in the right direction. If not, he would tell them he did not work there and keep moving.

Most people were normal about it.

One day, after meeting with a homeowner for his actual job, he stopped by his local Walmart to buy pens and a notepad for his work bag. He grabbed what he needed, checked out through self-checkout, paid for everything, and headed for the parking lot.

As he was walking out, he heard someone behind him yell, “And just where do you think you’re going?”

He assumed it was not meant for him. He had paid for his items, was not causing trouble, and had no reason to think anyone was talking to him. So he kept walking.

Then he heard it again, louder.

“Hey you! Stop!”

That got his attention because, as he put it, that is usually what someone says to a thief. He turned around and saw a Walmart employee storming toward him, furious.

The employee immediately started chewing him out for leaving his shift. She accused him of abandoning work and said he was not supposed to clock out for another three hours. The man tried to explain that she had the wrong person, but she would not let him get a word in.

Finally, she snapped that he was fired.

He stood there for a few seconds, probably trying to process how he had just been fired from a job he had never applied for, never accepted, and never worked. Then he told her plainly that he did not work there and never had.

The employee stared at him, muttered an apology, and ran back inside.

That was the whole original incident: a power-tripping employee mistook a random customer in khakis and a blue polo for a worker, chased him into the parking lot, fired him on the spot, and then realized too late that she had fired a shopper. The man shared the story on Reddit, where it was later preserved in a BestofRedditorUpdates post. The post notes that the original story appeared on r/IDontWorkHereLady in March 2020.

For a while, that was funny enough on its own.

Then, almost three years later, he had an update.

He went back to the same Walmart to pick up a few things and return one item for his wife. He was standing in the return line when the person ahead of him had an issue and an employee called for a manager.

It was the same woman.

He recognized her immediately. Somehow, she recognized him too — or at least thought she did. She pointed at him and told him he was not allowed to shop at that Walmart. If he did not leave, she said, she would call police.

He asked why he was banned.

She said she did not remember, but she knew he was.

At that point, he left. He and his wife apparently spent days laughing about the fact that the woman who once fired him from a job he never had had now banned him from a store for a reason she could not remember.

Then came the five-year update.

The man and his family moved to a new neighborhood near that Walmart. After meeting some neighbors, he learned one of them had worked at the same store. Naturally, he told the story because it was still hilarious.

That neighbor had news.

The manager had apparently been arrested and fired.

According to what the neighbor told him, the woman had a history of randomly banning people from the store. It was not a one-time misunderstanding with a customer in a blue polo. She had reportedly done similar things before, but because people did not complain much, nothing really happened. The store just shifted her around from department to department.

Then she allegedly got too aggressive with an off-duty police officer and tried to forcibly remove her from the store. The situation escalated, and the manager reportedly punched the officer. She was arrested and finally fired.

The neighbor also told him his ban had been lifted.

That final detail made the whole thing even more absurd. He had never worked at Walmart. He had been fired from Walmart. Then he had been banned from Walmart. Then, five years later, after the manager was arrested and fired, he was apparently welcome to shop there again.

The story worked because it kept escalating in the dumbest possible way. What began as mistaken identity in a parking lot turned into a years-long unofficial grudge from a manager who could not even remember what he had supposedly done wrong. And in the end, the same behavior that made the story funny when aimed at him apparently became serious when aimed at the wrong person.

Commenters loved the absurdity of someone being fired from a store where he had never worked. Several joked that he should have demanded severance, unemployment paperwork, or a meeting with the manager’s manager.

A lot of readers said the later updates made the original story feel more believable, not less. The manager’s behavior sounded like someone who had a pattern of overstepping, and the five-year update suggested the man had only seen one small piece of it.

Some commenters who had retail experience pointed out that a normal manager could not simply fire a random person in the parking lot or ban a shopper without proper cause and process. That made the woman’s confidence even stranger.

The biggest reaction was to the final update. Readers were amused that the man’s unofficial ban was lifted only after the manager was reportedly arrested and fired. It turned the whole story into a bizarre full-circle moment: he lost a job he never had, lost access to a store for a reason nobody knew, then got both cleared up by doing absolutely nothing.