This is a spinoff of my "Dear Amazon" post. If you have not read that post first, stop now and do that.
I was curious today if Walmart sold suicide cords, since I knew that they had 3rd-party sellers on their website.
Here we go again.
Aaaaand there's a second one.
What even is that second cord's title supposed to mean? I cannot think of a single person searching Walmart.com for a suicide cord with any of the words in that title 💀
That has got to be some of the worst SEO I have ever seen. "Americans Standard" sounds like some knock-off bathroom supply company.
Anyway, the phone representative said it would take 24 hours to have the products taken down. we're gonna test that!
Oh hey... the seller pages have phone numbers and addresses!
One Google Earth search later, and it looks like we've found their building.
Seems like an odd place for a suicide cord reseller to be based, but okay.
Wait what? ...oh.
Well I guess we can't be certain that that's the specific building, but hey, there's a photo sphere just down the road!
I guess they're all coming from just down this road, apparently.
Too bad we can't call them. Oh wait...
Well too bad I'm too cheap to call them...
Fuck you Verizon, $2.49/min is insane.
Google Voice is much better, but still not nothing.
I honestly considered it before I realized that West Taiwan China would probably harass me and my family for calling.
Well, if anyone wants to give it a go, I have saved both seller pages on archive.org.
Update 2024/7/13
You know how some spiders have all their babies on their back, and if you kill it all their babies run in every direction?
Like this:
Welp...
Turns out that Walmart is just as bad as Amazon, if not worse.
Anyway apparently opening 48 product tabs simultaneously tripped some kind of spam prevention so uhhhh
Time to call them and annoy some poor call center employee by reporting almost 50 items.
He was able to send an email to the risk prevention team to inform them about the items. He aid that once the team reads the email, the items will be investigated. I asked how long that woul take, and he said that usually they respond in 48h, but that it depends on the volume of the team's emails.
Time on call: 22m
Oh and fun fact, one of the two I first reported is still up.
Update 2024/7/26:
This seems interesting...
Looks like several of them are now marked "out of stock", along with changed images.
While that is still 19 items left, that's a hell of a lot better than Amazon has been doing recently. I called and poked them about it, and they said they made a "technical ticket" for it. We'll see how this goes.
Update 2024/8/12:
Looks like Walmart listens better than Amazon.
Time to report 20 more.
I'm sure the employee has to write up a report for each and every product which seems... tedious. I'd be happy to do that myself if I had the confidence that it would actually get looked at, but there's nothing quite like calling to know that a real human person at Walmart has looked into it.
Time on call: 19m30s