Joke Walmart: YouTubers are retaliated after "uttering" Walmart employees and pretending to fire them

A YouTube star counting more than a million subscribers claimed to be a Walmart executive and walked around the store telling employees that they had been fired – all for a video "joke". Lauren Love and her partner Joel Ashley have over 1.3 million subscribers on their joint channel, "Joel and Lauren TV". They also have three other channels, which bring together more than 500,000 subscribers.

The couple is well known for publishing "joke" videos, including "PRANK CACHE VERY HEALTHY ON GRILFRIEND" and "SURPRISING MY LITTLE FRIEND WITH FAKE GUCCI PRANK".

In April, they posted a video on their channel titled "Firing People Prank CEO IN THE HOOD", in which Love visits a Walmart store in Richmond, Texas. She pretends to be a Walmart leader, heading to several store employees and pretending to fire them.

The full video has been removed, but a video clip remains live on the Lauren and Joel channel.

"I am the CEO of this company," says Love informing an employee that he is not in the appropriate "area" of the store. "I'll have to take your badge and your jacket, you're fired." The employee does what she says by slowly putting a box down and removing the vest.

"What our employees have experienced in this video is disturbing and deserved," a spokesman for Walmart told CBS News on Friday. "We take this incident seriously and have taken several actions in response, including reporting the video to YouTube, intruding the woman into the video, and supporting our collaborators, which is unacceptable and we will continue to support them."

According to Click2Houston, one of the women that Love claimed to have had fire broke down in the original video. "Really, I was so crushed, I felt so little, I felt so helpless," said Maria Leones, who has worked at Walmart for six years. "At that moment, I felt so little."

PRANK GONE WRONG: What do you think of that? A social media creator went to a Richmond @Walmart and told the employees that they had been fired. A woman broke down because her husband's medical expenses depend on her work. His emotional plea for these pranks to end @ abc13houston at 45h. pic.twitter.com/l1CKMF2kWM

– Nick Natario (@ NickABC13) May 8, 2019

Love's latest Instagram contains hundreds of comments, many of which claim it for the video.

"Your actions were disgusting," wrote one speaker. "How come you have this huge platform, when you use it to publicly humiliate people?"

"The farce of Walmart was extremely insensitive," wrote another speaker. "You should excuse yourself."

Love and Ashley did not respond to CBS News' request for comment.

"Jokes" have become a popular trend on YouTube, many of which accumulate millions of views on a multitude of channels. YouTube has not responded to CBS News' request for comment.