Leave. Go home. Skedaddle.
From the aisles holding home goods to the ones filled with diapers, customers could hear her sing:
Well late night, has come.
And it’s time to go.
And the door will close very soon
Please don’t wait! Please don’t wait!
‘Till 10:55 to check out. Cause then we will clock out really late.
Those words took Kirby just minutes to write. Switching out familiar lyrics in songs for her own comes easy to her. Always has.
“When I did ‘Proud Mary,’ I literally, without even any music, wrote the lyrics to that while I was waiting on my Taco Bell order,” Kirby said of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song. “It’s just something I’ve always been able to do. Like I’ve said to other people, I don’t understand what all the hype is about because this is totally normal to me.”
“All the hype” is the attention her closing-time songs have been getting lately. Two months ago, the 47-year-old mother of two didn’t have a TikTok account. Now, videos of her late-night singing to shoppers at the Walmart in Woodstock, Va., have gone viral on it.
“Every time I see one of your videos I just smile,” one commenter wrote.
“They need a recording of your songs played at every Walmart at closing,” wrote another person.
“Thank you for being so uplifting,” wrote yet another person. “I’ve watched all of your videos and can honestly say you inspire me to be better every single day. Stay awesome!”
There is joy in watching Kirby sing. Her songs are playful. So, too, is her personality. She has a cheetah print tattoo on the side of her head and jokingly calls herself a “wildling.” She is also a hugger. She works at the customer service counter — which she likens to bartending because she often hears 5-minute versions of people’s life stories — and she’s been known to embrace customers who need it. “I will squeeze them up and say, ‘You know what? You’re going to be okay,’ ” she said.
That Kirby has gained a following for spreading happiness is particularly poignant because life hasn’t always dealt her generous amounts of it.
Since December, she has been homeless. The owner of the house where she was living needed to sell it, she said, and high real estate prices have made it difficult for her to afford another place. She said she has been staying with friends while looking for housing. She also said she refuses to wallow in sorrow over her circumstances.
“One of the biggest thrills of my life is making people laugh and smile and spreading joy, because I lived in the dark for so long,” she said. “I know what it’s like to walk in the dark all alone.”
Kirby, who grew up in New Market off Interstate 81, became a widow and single mother at the age of 31. Her two children, who are now grown and living on their own, were 5 and 10 at the time. Before that, as Kirby tells it, she was 11 when she lost her mother and she endured verbal and psychological abuse from an adult in her life. She said she was regularly told she couldn’t sing and called “dumb,” “fat” and “ugly.”
“I was told I would amount to nothing, and I believed it for so many years,” she said. “It’s been just since covid that I have learned to love myself. Having isolation and being alone with my thoughts, I have realized so many things about myself over the past couple years … I have accepted the fact that I’m all right just the way I am. And if anybody doesn’t like it, I don’t care. I’m happy with me and that’s all that matters.”
If people take anything beyond laughter away from her videos, she hopes it’s the realization that “anything is possible.”
Her closing-time songs haven’t just gained the attention of shoppers and TikTok users. Walmart executives have also taken notice — she received an invitation to sing at Walmart’s shareholders gathering in Arkansas in June.
“Her creativity is turning a standard announcement into a memorable moment, and that’s exactly the kind of experience we want shoppers to have in our stores,” Walmart spokesman Nick DeMoss said. “We’re so proud Keli is sharing her positivity with our customers and the world.”
Kirby usually works the evening shift, and she started performing the songs in April as a way to let customers know that the store, which used to remain open 24 hours a day, closes at 11 each night.
So far, she has told shoppers to get going using songs by Dolly Parton (think “Closing” instead of “Jolene”), Marvin Gaye, Neil Diamond, Uncle Kracker and, most recently, Lizzo.
Her first song was set to Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots are Made for Walkin’.” Her version began, “You keep shopping, when you ought to be paying.” The refrain: “These carts are made for pushin’.”
A fellow employee recorded her singing it and posted the video on TikTok. It drew a half-million views in a day. The response encouraged Kirby to create her own account. One of the first videos she posted shows her performing a parody of John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane.” That video has since drawn more than 11 million views.
Kirby has also gone from having about 230 followers on the platform to now more than 180,000. In a video she posted of her talking directly to those followers, she said she appreciated each of them: “Thank you all from the very bottom of my heart, from the very bottom of my soul. Y’all just don’t know. You don’t know what you’ve done. Y’all might have saved me a little bit.”
She also addressed in that video comments people had made about wanting to visit the Virginia store.
“So many of you have said that you want to come here and see me perform, and that’s fantastic,” she said, before adding, “as long as y’all get out by 11.”
