This week in TikTok: When Walmart and Amazon employees go viral

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There’s a TikTok that’s stuck with me ever since I saw it earlier this fall. It’s of a Walmart employee named Shana announcing all the racist and sexist behavior she witnessed during her time on the job over the store microphone, calling out her coworkers by name. She ended with, “I fucking quit.”

Shana later updated the nearly 35 million people who watched her video, saying that, yes, her speech was actually broadcast throughout the store in Lubbock, Texas (there’s video proof) and that as she walked out of the store she was met with tons of applause. A few people told her they’d never shop at Walmart again.

It’s the only thing I could think about when reporter Michael Waters broke the news this week that the company is now trying to turn 500 of its employees into social media influencers who proselytize about Walmart’s unique greatness. The program is called Spotlight and is only open to salaried, not hourly, employees, meaning that the vast majority of its 2.2 million workers are ineligible. Popular posts are rewarded with cash bonuses.

Retail employees from megachains like Sephora, Chipotle, and Starbucks have been going viral on TikTok since the app has existed, and for the most part, companies have tried to shut it down. A Panera employee was fired for her video “exposing” how its mac and cheese was prepared; a Chik-fil-A worker was let go for her viral video on menu hacks. Even when the content is inarguably innocuous — or positive! — big brands have bristled at the idea of their image being out of their control; just ask the Sherwin-Williams retail worker who was reportedly fired for simply sharing videos of how he mixed paint.

The only saving grace to Walmart’s rather ethically dubious influencer program is that it doesn’t appear to actually work: The two Walmart influencers Waters interviewed in his story have about 1,500 and 300 Instagram followers, respectively. Other brands that have attempted to turn their workers into stars have only succeeded when they chose TikTokers who had already built up massive followings, as was the case with Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Crew Ambassadors” program. (Consider Amazon’s laughable Twitter army of warehouse workers who flooded the site with pro-Amazon sentiments in 2019.)

But as the golden rule of social media authenticity suggests, the videos that travel the furthest are the ones that portray employees’ actual experiences. One of the first videos I saw when I opened the app this week was of a woman working silently and quickly in what appeared to be an Amazon fulfillment center.

Her captions begged viewers to shop local instead, arguing that the company’s coronavirus safety measures are “a joke,” that its productivity tracking is “inhumane,” and that it spies on and retaliates against workers attempting to unionize. In other videos, she said that she’d gotten two yeast infections in two months because she was so afraid of using the bathroom and lowering her productivity rates, and that the company has minimized the rising injuries among warehouse workers, especially during the peak holiday season. “Please support businesses who care about their employees’ health and well-being,” she wrote.

It’s clear why brands like Walmart are trying to take more ownership of employees’ social media content: They want to cancel out the effects of videos like this, ones that centralize the lived experiences of the lowest-ranking workers rather than burnishing a company’s image.

The problem, of course, is that this amounts to sponsored content, and nobody wants to watch that. Hearing Target employees tell you about the brand’s alleged practice of “letting people steal” from them until the total amount of stolen goods is equal to grand larceny is a lot more interesting than watching a Walmart worker show you his favorite Funko Pop dolls. And as long as TikTok is a platform driven by algorithmic popularity, the messy videos — the ones where employees leak secrets, quit on camera, or expose union suppression — will be the ones we’re most likely to see.

Of course, if Walmart manages to obtain a large enough stake in TikTok, all of this may be moot, and the platform could be reduced to an infinite scroll of creepily jubilant store greeters being forced to read from a corporate PR-approved script. Until then, retail workers of the world: Keep your cameras on.

Barely anyone in college turns their cameras on during Zoom lectures, but these students surprised their professor by showing their faces all at once. Spoiler: The professor cried, and so did I.