When you have one of your first jobs as a teenager, the potential of something going wrong is always looming. And though we try our hardest to keep things in check, mistakes happen. Luckily for most of us, those mistakes turn into lessons, which help us down the line when we take the first steps into our careers.
However, for one former Walmart employee, the mistake haunted him all his life.
In a recent viral TikTok video, which is gained more than 90,000 views since this past week, @theajbaron, or Aj Baron, told the tale of the embarrassing reason that he got fired from Walmart when he was just a teen — allowing a TV to get stolen when he could have stopped it.
He started by recounting his days working at Walmart, saying that most of the time, he would lug around large, high-value items, such as televisions.
Baron notes, “I was 18 years old, and the store was taking advantage of me.” He then showed a photo of himself stacking seven large televisions onto a pallet.
He then recounted that one day, a man came into the store who was asking to purchase a large television. Baron said he was quite exhausted that day, and the interaction seemed completely normal. He went to the back to retrieve the $400 TV, so he could take it out to the registers and complete the sale.
However, a couple of days later, his manager pulled him in the back to show him security footage of the transaction, and according to the footage, it didn’t go as smoothly as he believed.
“Rather than placing the cash that he handed me into the register, I put the change in cash in one hand and gave it back to him,” said Baron. “Essentially, this dude ended up going home with a $400 TV for which he didn’t pay a cent. I couldn’t even tell you what was going through my head at the time, and it was clearly an accident. I had no idea who this guy was, though the manager at Walmart didn’t care and ended up firing me anyway.”
This isn’t one of the most common reasons people get fired, and according to HR Digest, it usually has to do with something like a breach of policy, misconduct, or poor performance.
Of course, commenters had tons of fun with Baron’s story, and many of them shared their own stories of working in retail and accidentally giving away items without charging.
One person noted that they did this before when they were working at Dairy Queen. “When one customer came in and paid with cash, I completely spaced and handed them their change and cash back.”
Other commenters couldn’t believe that Baron was fired over the incident, noting that they should have just made him take it out of his paycheck.
