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Because Walmart: Weird Crimes at the Retail Giant

By Ephrat Livni, Esq. on January 13, 2016 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

There is something about Walmart that seems to bring out the weirdest in people. Maybe Walmart itself is not to blame. Maybe it's just that the chain has so many stores around the country (reportedly almost 5,000 operating in the US in 2015).

Whatever the reason, there are plenty of strange stories that come out of the chain, and the New York Daily News has collected the weirdest crimes at the retail giant from recent years.

Weird Walmart Crimes

  1. The Sock Thief: A 300-pound man walked into a Walmart in Pennsylvania buck naked to steal a pair of socks. Interestingly, the man actually got undressed in the parking lot before going in to steal the socks, according to footage from surveillance cameras.
  2. Sampling Extravaganza: A Florida woman had a blast spinning around a Sunshine State Walmart on a motorized shopping cart while sipping wine. The shopping must have made her hungry, however, so she grabbed some sushi. That was not to her liking, or maybe it just didn't pair well with the wine, so she politely put the uneaten sushi on her shelf and sat on the floor to eat a rotisserie chicken, mini muffins, and cinnamon buns.
  3. Sticky Stuff: A woman at a Delaware Walmart was most unpleasantly surprised to find herself the victim of a strange crime. A fellow shopper threw a handful of his semen at her, initially claiming he just had a cold and sneezed on her. Police concluded that the liquid on the woman's legs was his semen and that he tossed it at her "because he was sexually attracted to her."

Because Walmart

A study by a University of South Carolina study published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2014, and reported in the Huffington Post, linked Walmart stores to higher crime rates in counties around the country. The store, of course, dismissed the study's methodology.

According to the study, "If the corporation built a new store, there were 17 additional property crimes and 2 additional violent crimes for every 10,000 persons in a county." But even the study's authors admitted that higher crime rates in Walmart counties were not necessarily caused by the stores, but because the chain tends to build in poorer places.

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