A Wheelchair-Bound Walmart Shopper Wearing A Vest Was Mistaken For a Store Employee, And She Didn’t Try To Keep Her Patience

Matthew Gilligan

2 months ago

Shutterstock/Reddit

This is why it’s important to pay attention to your surroundings, people!

And let this be a reminder to think before you speak, okay?

Check out this story from Reddit and see what you think about what happened.

[Negative Encounter] Another Vest Story.

“I’m generally confined to using a wheelchair due to a barrage of medical reasons.

I use a manual wheelchair, and the “Rascal” mobility aids that most stores provide. Due to many years of nearly being struck by hapless drivers in the Vancouver area of SW Washington State, I’ve taken to wearing “High-Vis” safety vests in various styles to at least prevent injury.

Oh, boy…

As you might imagine, some (though not all) supermarkets and stores around here use similar vests for their employees. This causes me to get mistaken for an employee all the time. So, on with the show.

[Walmart, 4th Plain, Vancouver, Washington]

Once more, I find myself at the Walmart on 4th Plain. This is the same location where previously a Karen had mistaken me for an employee while shopping in the Men’s Apparel Section.

As is often the case, my roommate K needed to get a massive shopping run done, and I just had to top off some supplies. I took less than 10 minutes to get everything I needed, check out, and move the scooter over to the wall so I could face the check-out lanes.

I was sitting between the Customer Service bay, and the restrooms. I had a cart full of groceries, in bags.

The vest I’d chosen to wear that day is black, with the high-visibility green secondary highlights, and reflective strips. I wore under that my black t-shirt, black jeans, black boots, and my black pride-edition SF 49ers hat with extra pride swag.

So…pretty much looking as unlike an employee as possible. This Walmart uses grey vests with a rainbow of different colors across it, or the gold ones with the blue lettering.

All of them clearly display the Walmart logo, say Walmart on it, and have ID badges clipped to the front. If you see my example, it has no logos at all.

You know what’s coming next…

Now that I’ve painted the picture, lets introduce our Karen today.

I’d describe Karen as the kind of woman that likely would be standing on her porch all day long shouting at the “colored folk”. She had this sleeveless sun-dress with bright flowery colors with no bra, and some swimming sandals. “Thongs” or “Flip-Flops” to some.

Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed/treated in at least 90 days, her complexion suggested she likely had smoked since she was 9 (her father insisted I’m sure), and gave me the impression of one of those women you’ll see on the news after a tornado.

“We lost errything. This is da fifdth thyme! I dunneh why dem tweesterz like-teh gobble up er trailers! Must be dat reptile Illuminati and day wethur control debice!”

She’s pushing a cart, eyes narrowed in the classic “out of ***** to give” facial expression. She comes to an immediate halt next to me. Since she was absolutely not subtle about her approach, I’d tracked her the entire time until this moment.

Here we go…

“Hey. Why in the <censored> is the <censored again> customer service area closed?” Karen demands to know.

“Oh for ***** sake…” I think to myself. “I’m not sure, to be entirely honest.” I say aloud.

“Well why don’t you?! If you got time to sit on your ***, you’ve got time to work. So spill it.” She barks. There is a mild irony in her words, as I was drinking ice water from the attached Subway as she spoke.

“Well, because I don’t work here.”

“Oh really? Ya don’t. What’s with the vest then?” She inquires.

“For safety. Duh. I don’t work here.”

“Then tell me why the Customer Service is closed?”

They weren’t getting through to her…

I wanted to beat my head against the wall. To save time and text-space, this goes on for several minutes. This loop of her cursing me out, asking what I was doing in a vest if I didn’t work there, not accepting even the most basic of logic.

To my great relief one of the managers that knew me, saw me and the Karen having a rather one-sided cage match of wits, and double-timed it over to us.

She asks the Karen what was going on. Karen asks right off if I worked there or not, because she thought I was an ******* either way.

Manager repeats pretty much everything I’d already said, with a sprinkling of language I call “Manager talk”. As if I’d been speaking to Karen this entire time in Navajo, suddenly Karen gets the picture.

Now she rounds on the manager demanding to know why the C.S. area was closed. Manager tells her the system went down for the whole store – and even if it hadn’t, it would’ve closed anyway 15 minutes earlier.

Karen looked like she was about to morph into pink-flowery Hulk. She stomped off, trying to look big-mad as she did so, making those stupid sandals of her smick-smack off the tiles.

Manager and I share a mutual sigh of annoyance, greeted one another, wished each-other well, and parted ways. I went home shortly after this with no further incident.”

Let’s see what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person spoke up.