8 Precautions Tennesseans Should Take When Shopping at Walmart
Your Walmart total isn’t always the final price.
A small slip can follow you home and cost you money you never planned to spend.
These are the precautions Tennesseans should take when shopping at Walmart.
1. Setting Substitution Preferences
When something on your pickup or delivery order is out of stock, Walmart offers a similar item.
Before you place your order, you can choose the items you don’t want substituted, and Walmart removes them from your order if they’re out of stock.
The catch is that Walmart charges you the price of any substituted item.
You have a limited time to respond to an offer, and Walmart substitutes the item if you neither accept nor decline it.
At the store, you can let the associate know you don’t want a substitution, and they’ll remove it from your order.
2. Matching Receipts to Shelf Tags
Walmart stores made up 19 of the 61 stores North Carolina’s agriculture department fined for price-scanner errors in the second quarter of 2022.
The commissioner said shoppers should check their receipts as well as the shelf price, and alert managers if they’re wrong.
In North Carolina, a store whose overcharge error rate tops 2% gets a more intensive follow-up inspection.
In Tennessee, the Department of Agriculture’s inspectors are responsible for checking store price scanners.
If an item scans higher than the shelf price at your Walmart, you can file a Weights and Measures complaint with that department online.
3. Checking Recall Codes
Walmart’s Great Value cottage cheese recall in February 2026 covered 24 states, including Tennessee.
Saputo recalled small curd cottage cheese sold under the Great Value label because its liquid dairy ingredients may not have been fully pasteurized.
Not every tub was affected.
A tub counted only if its size, Universal Product Code (UPC), date and plant code all matched the recall listing.
You’ll find the date and plant code on the side of the container’s lid.
If your tub matches, you shouldn’t eat it.
The recall notice says you can return a matching tub to the place of purchase for a full refund.
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4. Reading Walmart+ Trial Terms
Walmart+ trials auto-renew into a full-price annual or monthly membership unless the terms say otherwise.
After a trial, Walmart charges you immediately for the initial term.
Paid memberships renew automatically, and Walmart charges the renewal to your saved payment method without further notice unless the law requires notice.
You can cancel by calling Walmart Customer Care or through your account under Walmart+, but you must do it before your current term ends.
Walmart+ fees are generally non-refundable, and canceling during a trial can end your membership immediately.
5. Keeping Your Return Receipt
You have 90 days after purchase or receipt to return most Walmart items.
Walmart recommends keeping your receipt and packaging for at least 90 days.
On Walmart.com, your purchase history displays the latest eligible date for a return or replacement.
If a Marketplace seller sold and shipped the item, you have 30 days to return it.
Walmart’s Shorter Return Windows
Walmart’s 90-day window shrinks for electronics you buy in a store.
You get 30 days for many consumer electronics.
Wireless phones get just 14 days.
6. Verifying Texts, Emails and Checks
A text saying you’ve won a free gift card is a move fraudsters may use, and Walmart doesn’t notify contest winners by text message.
Recall alerts come through official websites and direct email, not text.
Walmart will never mail you a check and ask you to deposit it to buy an item or service.
Before you trust a message labeled as Walmart’s, hold it up against the points above.
If a suspicious email claims to be from Walmart, send it to OnlineAbuse@walmart.com as an attachment instead of pasting it into a message.
7. Treating Gift Cards Like Cash
Treat a Walmart Gift Card the same as cash, and never send money or give gift card information to someone you don’t know.
A request to pay a utility bill with a Walmart Gift Card is a red flag since other businesses don’t accept them.
In June 2025, Walmart agreed to pay $10 million to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that it let scammers defraud consumers through its money transfers from 2013 to 2018.
Tennesseans lost over $943,000 to prepaid gift card scams in 2018, according to the state Department of Commerce and Insurance.
Psst! How much do you know about shopping at Walmart? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Walmart Shopper IQ
Answer these questions on Walmart policies, scam warnings and price-scanner rules. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Tennessee’s Department of Commerce and Insurance reported that losses to prepaid gift card scams rose by about what share from 2017 to 2018?
8. Choosing a SNAP Backup Payment
Walmart is one of the stores the U.S. Department of Agriculture lists for online Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) purchases in Tennessee.
SNAP benefits can't pay for fees of any type, such as delivery, service or convenience fees.
Your backup payment choice matters when an item on your SNAP order is out of stock.
Under Walmart's substitution policy, a SNAP order with no backup gets a substitute that costs the same or less, or the item is canceled and refunded to your SNAP benefits.
With a backup, Walmart charges the difference for a pricier substitute to that payment method, and it's subject to sales tax.
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