in my highschool days i did this many times.
at Wal-Mart you do not need a receipt, at least you didnt back then.
they just took my ID and said you could only return without a receipt 3 times per year.
I bet a girl-friend of mine that you could do this and she didnt beleive me, i think i did it with a set of $80 fog lights…
A friend of mine at the time had just left his job as a dept. manager at Wal-Mart and told me all the return stories he had seen… so i decided to test them out and sure enough it worked.
you can also return things to Wal-Mart that you didnt buy there… i once obtained a Garmin GPS for next to nothing and returned it at Wal-Mart for $335 in store credit with which i bought all my christmas presents with.
as for the ‘theft’ issue… Fuck Wal-Mart anyways… conceptually speaking theft is wrong. In practice, when done at wal-mart, it is by far the lesser of muliple evils.
i could go on for hours about more stories like this, but maybe in person and not on the interweb.