Walmart Fires Employee for Confronting Customer Who Left Dog in Hot Car

If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know how much hatred I have (and I’m sure all of you feel the same way) for morons who live their dogs inside hot cars while they “run in to do some shopping just for a minute”.

Carla Cheney, a former pharmacy technician at Walmart in Kemptville, Ontario, feels the same way, so when she saw a man leaving his Newfoundland dog inside of his pickup truck in the parking lot of the Walmart where she worked, Cheney felt compelled to do something about it, and confronted him on his asshattery.

“I said he should not be leaving his dog in the car. The man said it was none of my business.”

Cheney says that this sort of thing is nothing new – in fact, she says that Kemptville Walmart customers leave pets inside their vehicles almost every day, no matter how hot the weather. Less than a week before the incident that got her fired, Cheney, a dog owner herself, witnessed another customer leaving her dog inside of her car, on a scorching hot day.

“I was pretty upset and I said to my manager, ‘What do I do?’ He said it was none of our business and went into the store.”

Cheney disagreed, and phoned the police herself. They responded to the call, and reprimanded the woman for leaving her dog inside the car (I hope ‘reprimand’ is secret cop code for ‘slapped the moron upside the head with a baton’).

When Cheney confronted the owner of the Newfoundland Dog, she had not yet started her shift, and was still wearing her street clothing. Despite acting as a ‘civilian’, and on her own time, Cheney was called into her Manager’s office on the day of the encounter, and told she was being terminated for being ‘rude to a customer’.  She was then escorted out of the store by security, which she said was ‘humiliating’.

Walmart Kemptville seems to have a history of terminating employees who speak up on behalf of animals. Sean Dhaliwal, another former employee of the same store, was fired after he confronted a customer who left a dog inside a hot car. Dhaliwal had already given his two week’s notice, but was told not to come back to the store to finish out his shifts.

Walmart Canada issued a statement saying,

“there are guidelines in place for associates to follow when it comes to identifying dangers, including pets in danger.”

Apparently, those guidelines are something along the lines of “shut up and go clean the bathrooms, wage slave”.

Cheney has now retained a lawyer, and plans to contest her firing.

Read more here on Cheney’s firing.