A Walmart Manager Watched a Viral Video of a Homeless Man Feeding His Dog Before Himself. He Recognized the Man. They Used to Work Together.
I want to tell you about Marcus when he worked for me, because the rest of this story does not work without him.
He had come to the company in 2009 as a department manager at a different location. He had been promoted three times in four years. He had taken over the south Tulsa store in February of 2013, when he was thirty-one. He had been the youngest store manager in the district at the time.
Marcus was, in every measurable category, exceptional.
He knew every employee in his store by name. He knew their kids’ names. He knew which ones were going through divorces. He knew which ones were trying to finish their GEDs. He knew which ones were taking care of elderly parents. He had set up an unofficial schedule rotation that allowed people to swap shifts when they needed to handle family emergencies, which meant his employees were almost never absent without notice.
He had done all of this within company policy. He had been creative inside the rules.
I had liked him.
I had also, in 2014, met his wife, Lina.
She had come to the store one afternoon to bring him lunch. She had been thirty. She had been a kindergarten teacher at a school about ten minutes away. She had been quiet, kind, with a particular smile that made you want to sit down and tell her your whole life. She had brought him lunch in a stainless steel container with two small forks.
They had been married four years at the time.
They had been trying for a baby for two of those years.
I had not known that. I had not asked. I had just registered, watching them sit on a bench by the front of the store eating turkey sandwiches together at 1:15 p.m. on a Wednesday in October of 2014, that they were the most quietly in love couple I had ever seen.
In November of 2016, Marcus came into my office at the district headquarters in Tulsa. He had asked for a private meeting. He had closed the door.
He had told me Lina had been diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer.
He had told me he wanted me to know.
He had told me he was not asking for time off. He had told me he had vacation banked. He had told me his store would not suffer.
I had told him I was sorry. I had asked him if he needed anything from me.
He had said, “Thanks, Greg. I’ll let you know.”
He had walked out.
He had not, after that meeting, mentioned Lina to me again.
I want to tell you about the spring of 2017.
I want to tell you because I have spent the last eight years thinking about it without thinking about it. I have, many times, replayed the meetings I had with Marcus that spring, and I have done them in my head with the man I knew in 2014 — the calm, kind, exceptional store manager — and not the man I was actually meeting with, who was a man whose wife was dying.
I want to write what I saw at the time, and then what I should have seen.
What I saw at the time:
In April of 2017, Marcus started coming in late. The first time was a Monday morning meeting. He was forty minutes late. He apologized. He did not give a reason. I had asked him if everything was okay. He had said yes.
Two weeks later, he was an hour and a half late to a regional inventory walkthrough. I had been standing in the parking lot of his store with the team waiting for him. He had pulled in at 9:33 a.m. instead of 8:00 a.m. He had apologized. He had not given a reason. I had been embarrassed in front of the regional team.
By June, he was missing his Monday meetings entirely. He was sending an assistant manager in his place. He was not responding to my emails for forty-eight hours sometimes. He was, in the language of corporate evaluations, disengaging.
In July, I had pulled him into my office. I had told him this had to stop. I had told him his performance was being noticed at the regional level. I had told him I was prepared to write him up if it continued.
I had asked him, point blank, “Marcus. Is there something going on? Is this about Lina?”
He had said, “No, Greg. Lina is — Lina is fine. I’m just — I’m working on something at home. I’ll get it sorted.”
I had taken him at his word.
I should not have.
What I should have seen, in retrospect:
His clothes had been wrinkled in a way they had never been wrinkled before. His shirts had been stained at the cuffs in places that meant he had been doing his own laundry, badly, instead of having Lina do it. He had lost weight. His face had been gray.
He had stopped wearing his wedding ring in May.
I had not noticed the ring. I want to be honest. I had not noticed.
I gave him three written warnings in June and July. In early August, I let him go.
I sat across from him at his store in his office. I told him I had no choice. I told him the regional team had been asking. I told him this was the hardest firing I had ever done.
He had nodded. He had thanked me for the four years. He had asked if he could keep his employee discount card for one more week. He had said he wanted to buy some groceries at the prices he had earned.
I had said yes.
He had cleaned out his office in twenty-eight minutes. He had walked out without saying anything to his team.
I had not seen him for eight years.
I did not, until the night I watched the viral video at my kitchen table, know what I had actually been doing in 2017.
The next morning, on a Thursday in March of this year, I drove to the south Tulsa Walmart at 6:30 a.m.
I parked in the back lot. I sat in my truck for twenty minutes. I watched the front entrance from a distance.
He was already there.
He was sitting against the brick exterior wall by the cart corral. He had on layers of donated clothing — a black hoodie, a flannel jacket, two pairs of pants, work boots that were not his size. He had a small piece of cardboard with the words Hungry. Anything helps. written in marker.
The German Shepherd was lying on a folded blanket next to him. The dog had a small bowl in front of him. The bowl had water in it. The water bowl was a Walmart-brand plastic one. I knew because I had ordered them for the pet department six months earlier.
The dog was thin but not emergency-thin. His coat was dull. He had a notch in his right ear that he had not had in 2017. He was — I knew, because he was lying with his head on Marcus’s foot — comfortable.
The dog’s name was Sergeant. I remembered him from 2017. Marcus had brought him to a company picnic in 2015. Sergeant had been a year and a half old then. He was now, by my math, eleven years old.
I sat in my truck and I cried.
I cried for fifteen minutes. I am not proud of it. I am also not embarrassed. I cried because in the eight years since I had last seen Marcus, I had been promoted twice. I had bought a bigger house. I had taken vacations. I had retired my mother in a comfortable assisted-living facility in Oklahoma City.
He had been losing his wife. Then he had been losing his job. Then he had been losing his home.
He had been keeping his dog.
I got out of the truck at 7:00 a.m.
I walked across the parking lot toward him.
He saw me coming when I was still about thirty feet away. His face did something I have not been able to describe correctly to anyone who has asked. It did not register surprise. It did not register fear. It did not register shame.
It registered nothing. He just watched me approach.
I stopped about six feet from him. I did not crouch — I knew, instinctively, that crouching would have been condescending. I stayed standing. I put my hands in my pockets.
I said, “Marcus.”
He said, “Greg.”
His voice was the same voice I had heard for four years in district meetings. Lower now. More tired. But the same voice.
I said, “Marcus. I owe you an apology that I have been preparing for thirteen hours. Will you let me give it to you?”
He looked at me for a long time.
Then he said, “Greg. Sit down.”
I sat down on the asphalt next to him. Next to Sergeant. Next to the cardboard sign that said Hungry. Anything helps. on the south Tulsa Walmart sidewalk on a Thursday morning in March.
I sat there for ninety minutes.
I want to tell you what Marcus told me in those ninety minutes.
I want to tell you because I have been carrying it ever since, and because — even though I have his permission, given clearly the day I am writing this — I am still careful with the words.
Lina had died on July 19th of 2017.
She had been thirty-three.
She had been on home hospice for the last six weeks of her life. He had cared for her himself in their small house on the east side of Tulsa. He had taken her to her appointments. He had administered her medications. He had bathed her. He had read to her at night.
He had been, in the spring of 2017 — the spring I had been writing him up for being late — sitting next to his wife’s hospice bed every morning until she woke up, hand-feeding her ice chips and applying balm to her cracked lips, and then driving twenty-five minutes to my Walmart store and apologizing to me without explaining why.
He had not told me about Lina because he had not wanted to use her dying as a reason.
He had told me later, sitting on the asphalt: “Greg. I had decided early on that I wasn’t going to ask the company for anything because of her. She didn’t deserve to be a reason. She wasn’t a reason. She was my wife.”
Lina had died on a Wednesday morning at 7:14 a.m., he told me. He had been in the bed with her. He had held her hand. He had not gone to work that day.
He had cleaned out his office sixteen days later, on the Wednesday I had fired him.
He had not told me, that day, that his wife had been dead sixteen days.
After Lina died, he had not been able to stay in the house. The mortgage had been in both their names. Her medical bills had been catastrophic. They had not had life insurance. He had lost the house to the bank in early 2018.
He had moved into a motel for three months. Then a shelter. Then his car. Then no car.
He had kept Sergeant the entire time.
He told me, on the asphalt, “Greg. I was offered a place at a shelter that didn’t take dogs. I told them no. I was offered a roommate situation that didn’t take dogs. I told them no. There were nights I slept under bridges in February so the dog could be with me. I had decided early on. I was not letting go of one more thing.”
I had asked him, quiet, why he had ended up at the south Tulsa Walmart.
He had said, “Because it was the only building in this city where I had ever been good at something.”
I had wept openly on the asphalt at that point. I had not been ashamed.
Marcus had not wept.
He had put his hand on Sergeant’s head. He had said, very simply, “He’s the reason I’m still alive, Greg. He needed to eat. So I had to eat. So I had to wake up. So I had to keep going. I have not had a single day in eight years where I could have decided not to wake up. Because of him.”
I want to tell you what we did next.
I called the regional VP that afternoon. I told him I needed an exception in our hiring policy. I told him I needed it for a former store manager I had let go in 2017 for circumstances I had not fully understood at the time. I told him I wanted to bring Marcus back as an assistant store manager on a re-entry track, with full benefits and back-payment of our rehire bonus structure.
I told the VP, “Don. I need you to trust me on this one. I will explain the whole thing, but I need you to say yes today.”
Don is a man I have worked with for nineteen years. He said yes without asking for the explanation.
Then I made one more call.
I called my legal team. I asked them to research what flexibility we had on store policy regarding service animals and employee animals. I told them to find me a path. I told them I needed an answer within forty-eight hours.
The path existed. It was narrow. It required Sergeant to be designated as an emotional support animal under specific documentation, and it required the corporate VP for HR policy to sign off on a one-store exception. I requested both. Both happened within ten days.
I drove back to the south Tulsa Walmart on a Saturday morning ten days after the first conversation.
Marcus was in the same spot. Sergeant was lying on the same blanket.
I told him about the job offer. I told him about the back-pay. I told him about the medical insurance, which would start the day he started.
He listened. He did not say anything.
When I was finished, he said, “Greg. I want to say yes. But I have a condition.”
I said, “Anything.”
He said, “Sergeant. He doesn’t go back to a kennel during my shifts. He doesn’t stay in a car. He doesn’t get left behind. He is eleven years old. He does not have a lot of time left. I’m not spending what he does have separated from him.”
He said, “He comes inside the store with me. Or I don’t come.”
I had already arranged for that. I told him so.
He looked at me for a long time.
He said, “Greg. Why.”
I said, “Because I owe you eight years of asking. I should have asked in May of 2017 why you were late. I didn’t. And you lost everything that mattered to you while I was writing you up. The least I can do, the absolute least I can do, is bring you back inside the building you used to run.”
He nodded. Once.
He said, “Okay, Greg. Okay.”
Marcus has been the assistant store manager at the south Tulsa Walmart for seven months.
He has been promoted to acting store manager twice during the absence of the current manager. He is on track to be permanently promoted within the year.
His employees have noticed something about him. They have told me, on visits I have made to the store, that Marcus knows their kids’ names. He knows which ones are taking care of elderly parents. He knows which ones are working second jobs. He has set up an unofficial scheduling rotation for shift swaps.
He is, in every measurable category, exceptional.
He is the man I supervised in 2014 again.
Sergeant lies inside the front entrance of the Walmart now, on a thick orthopedic dog bed I bought him myself out of my own paycheck. He is positioned exactly where the front-end customer greeter used to stand before greeters were phased out.
The employees call him Greeter.
Marcus calls him the reason I am still alive.
Customers come in. Sergeant lifts his head. He thumps his tail. Some of them know the story by now — the video stayed up, the local paper did a feature — and they kneel down to scratch his ears. Some of them do not. They just see a friendly old shepherd by the front door of the store.
Sergeant does not care which kind they are.
He does the same thing for all of them.
He lifts his head. He thumps his tail. He goes back to sleep.
I have stopped at the south Tulsa Walmart every single Wednesday morning since Marcus came back. I do not stay long. I get a coffee from the in-store McDonald’s. I walk through the store. I check in with Marcus. I scratch Sergeant’s ears.
I leave.
It is the most important meeting on my calendar.
Last week I asked Marcus if he had ever been angry at me.
He thought about it for a long time.
He said, “Greg. For about four years, yes. Then I stopped having the energy.”
He said, “I’m not angry now.”
He said, “I’m just glad somebody recognized me.”
I said, “Marcus. I am so sorry it took a viral video.”
He said, “Greg. It took what it took.”
He scratched Sergeant’s ear.
We both went back to work.
Follow this page for more stories about the people we should have asked one more question.
