Thanks for posting this.

This is the one Cheney who should NOT be out of a job.

But couldn't the employer be looking out for the safety of the employee? If that guy was a nutjob in addition to being an animal abuser and didn't like being confronted the way he was in that parking lot, there could have been a more tragic ending to this story. If the employer gave her his seal of approval for the employee to confront random customers about wrongdoing on store property, I could see how the employer could be held liable if something went wrong. A lot of stores have a "no interference, just report" policy even when it comes to shoplifters because they don't want their employees to get hurt when they try to stop them.

From a management perspective and as a general rule, it might make sense to have a supervisor deal with customer problems. There are probabley safety and liability issues at play.

Having said that, I don't know how walmart operates and the employee may have felt that telling a manager would not have solved the problem. If she had no faith that management would follow through, I can see why she did what she did.

and was waiting for her shift to start. I suppose she still could have asked a supervisor to handle it, but still, getting fired seems drastic.

Before I saw the video I wondered if maybe she was belligerent, but her appearance on the video makes me seriously doubt that she was at all rude to the customer.

then it could still be a problem from a PR perspective. It sounds like she wasn't fired because she had the incident with the customer. Rather, she was fired because, after being told not to do something like that again, she told her employer that she would indeed do it again. This is basically admitting that she would disregard explicit directives and/or company policy, which is probably never a good thing to say to management if you want to keep your job.

I'm the last person to defend walmart, I completely agree that firing her was drastic, and I think she did the right thing in confronting the customer. Walmart, as usual, is being a total buttwad about this.