Target Workers Share Their Craziest Stories
You hear crazy retail stories every Black Friday, but for employees at Target, calming down screaming customers or dealing with extreme couponers is all in a day’s work. Cosmopolitan.com asked Target workers to share the craziest things they’ve ever seen customers do, and - spoiler - things get pretty weird.
1. "I was working checkout during Black Friday around 2 a.m. and a dad was buying a monster truck toy for his son. An old woman sees the monster truck and she goes, “Excuse me, young man, can I have that for my grandson?” He tells her that he’s buying it. She says she’ll pay for it because it’s hers, and she starts pulling it from him in line, really subtly. He starts getting mad at her, but then security gets involved, and he seems like he was the one who was in the wrong, and they’re telling him to calm down. The old woman buys the truck in self-checkout and leaves the store while this is happening. That truck was also the last one in the store, so the dad wasn’t able to get another one."
2. "Someone brought in three full Target bags of groceries to return because they said their kids didn’t like what they bought. It’s the rules that we have to accept food to return if it’s unopened, and then we usually throw them out or donate them to charity. But it was three full bags of different types of cereal, granola bars, and other foods like that. I wanted to ask how her kids didn’t like a single thing she had bought, but sometimes it’s best not to ask."
3. "A lady came to my register with a huge stack of coupons. I think she could tell I was new and didn’t know all of the rules about how many coupons you can use - there’s a coupon limit per item and transaction. If the register said she used too many coupons, and she would ask me to override it. The entire transaction took about an hour and a half, and by the end of it, she only owed about $1 for $500 worth of stuff. But then she told me I must have missed a coupon, and she had her elderly mother with her, and I didn’t want to fight it, so I scanned one more coupon and she walked away with two carts of stuff, completely for free."
4. "There was an older guy that would show up at my Target, buy a large soda from the fast-food area, and sit in the back corner and people-watch for about four or five hours at a time. He was pretty nice, but people got a little freaked out because he was always there."
5. "I was working the Pizza Hut in Target, and a woman with six children comes up to the counter and asks for six pizzas. We can only do two at a time, so I told her it would take about 15 minutes. She got so mad at me, saying it was ridiculous she would have to wait that long. Then she asks her kids if they want to wait for the pizza, and one of the little girls starts crying and says she really wants pizza. Instead of ordering, she calls someone, and by the time she gets off the phone, the entire situation has already taken up 15 minutes. I ask her what she wants to do, and she says she can’t wait and storms off with her children. The pizzas would have been done in the 15 minutes she was complaining."
6. "A woman came in at 10:30 at night completely drunk and tried to buy three bottles of alcohol. It’s a law in Wisconsin, where I live, that you can’t buy alcohol after 9 p.m. We tried explaining this to her but she freaked out. She slammed her fist into a display of soap near the register and knocked the entire thing over. Then she screamed as she was walking out of the store. My manager told her to have a good night, and then she screamed the C word at him."
7. "We had these teen girls come in one winter. They grabbed some bean bag chairs and sat in the middle of the aisle and started eating snow that they brought in from outside. They asked people who walked past where they could buy more snow and ice. They weren’t bothering anyone, so we just let them stay there. They sat there for about an hour and then left."
8. "A woman was at self-checkout buying diapers and wet wipes for her kids. She was trying to get them for $20, which wasn’t the price. She told me that they weren’t ringing up correctly, and I told her that was the price. She made me get the price tag. She still didn’t believe me so she asked me to get the manager. She asked my manager if she had kids and my manager said yes. Then the woman said my manager was a bad mom if she didn’t let her have the diapers and wet wipes for the reduced price. My manager explained that she couldn’t just make up a price and the woman told her again that she was a bad mom. She left the store without buying those things."
9. "During the five years I worked at Target, there was a guy who came in at least once a week and would buy $100 to $200 worth of toys and would be back the next week to return some of them. Once our store manager commented to him that he must be a great dad because of all the toys he bought, and he got sort of embarrassed and told us that he was selling them on eBay."
10. "A woman would come in every time there was a sale on Tide and would buy, like, 16 at a time. She also bought a lot of cleaning supplies. She would always use a lot of coupons, so she would get them for really cheap. One of my coworkers saw her reselling them in the neighborhood at a higher price. This same woman also posted in a local couponing Facebook group that I hated coupons, because I limited how many she could use once. She told the other couponers not to come to my register."
11. "There was a woman who always came into the store with her 3- or 4-year-old son on weekends when I was working. One weekend, she came in and was flirting with the guy who worked in electronics, and she asked another worker if that guy was single. Then she went to another part of the store. Soon after, her son jumped off a bench and hit his head on the ground, but she wasn’t near him. We had to find his mom in the store because the paramedics were on their way to take the boy to the hospital. The crazy thing is she came back that same day, around 9 p.m., with her son. She acted like it didn’t even happen and went back to electronics to hit on the same guy."
12. "I was working on a busy day, and all of a sudden we hear a woman screaming. I walk up to her like, 'How can I help you?' as she’s still yelling. Then she asks me where the lightbulbs are. So this woman was just screaming until someone came to her to show her where the lightbulbs were."
13. "An old man came in who had clearly had an accident. None of us wanted to tell him that he had clearly pooped his pants, so we all just kept silent tabs on him as he walked through the store to make sure nothing else happened or he didn’t sit down anywhere. We couldn’t tell him to leave the store because he didn’t do anything wrong so the employees just sort of tailed him until he left the store."
14. "I was scanning a woman’s packaged beef and she got angry because I touched the clear film on the top of it. She said that if you touch the film, you touch the beef, and she called me an 'insipid human being' and threatened to go to another store. She still bought the beef."
15. "A woman buys one of our steamed cheese pretzels for her and her kid. She comes back when she’s done shopping, and she tells me it was the worst pretzel she ever had, and she can’t believe I served it to her. I ask if she wants me to talk to a manager and she says no, that she just wanted me to know. Then she just left."
16. "A lady was trying to buy a pair of boots for 50 percent off, except the promotion was only available through the Cartwheel app. I tried to explain this to her, but she didn’t believe me. She left the line to get the sign that said 50 percent off. She brought it back to the line with her to show me. The whole thing took, like, 20 minutes, so I just gave her the discount."
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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