Stopped at Target to look for some shoes.
Customers are terrible. I feel bad for the employees who have to clean that mess.
I feel bad for the employees who have to clean that mess.
especially because 1) it will be trashed again in 30 minutes, and 2) they get paid crap
My wife works at Target and usually the managers take turns with the gross cleanups. That can include vomit, piss and shit but sometimes creative stuff you wouldn’t think of like a customer put a package of meat back behind a shelf so no one knew it was there until it was rancid, started leaking and smelling like a dead body.
That’s awful nice of the managers to take that on. I honestly think that anything that involves biohazard should not be handled by store employees at all.
30 minutes is generous. I’ve watched the aisle get trashed in 5 minutes when I took my son shoe shopping for school last year. We were the only ones who put things back.
Honestly? You can take those bad feelings and shove them, messes like this will be made regardless of how you feel so instead of feeling bad for us maybe you should suck it up or shop somewhere else. We don’t want your pity, we just wanna work and go home.
Sorry for wishing people didn’t make your job more difficult? Jesus the internet is never predictable.
My job isn’t difficult, it’s annoying. It’ll be annoying with or without your pity.
I think you’re confusing pity with empathy.
In any case, it’s pretty clear that the original comment bore no ill intent, so why are you reacting so aggressively?
Duh. Because they’re annoyed.
Nah, I haven’t seen a mess like this in any of the stores in Belgium.
Almost like normal customers will clean up after themselves instead of behaving like a spoiled toddler and claiming people like you are getting paid to clean it anyway.
Says more about the American consumer than Target.
Spot on. You don’t see this at the targets I’ve been to thankfully
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As wages and the number of employees per store has decreased (not just target but everywhere), the more of this kind of shit I see.
When there’s only two people running a whole store while making 10 bucks an hour this is the quality you get. Your next quarter earnings might be great but your entire chain of businesses will go fucking bankrupt when everyone starts avoiding your locations.
I’m seeing this with retail and fast food places. Man I used to love Boston Market but I don’t step foot in there now. Same with Dunkin Donuts, total shithole, every one of em.
Almost like moderate gains and taking care of employees takes care of the business. I’m baffled at how many CEOs force bad decisions in terms of immediate profits.
Because cutting costs is a very quick way of showing you are improving the bottom line in the short term and you get a bigger bonus that quarter. It is very easy to show savings from things like layoffs. Improving sales is harder to identify (was it the products? advertising? a mystery trend?) and take longer to appear on their charts. You’ll likely jump ship for the next job before the damage from your cuts shows up anyway.
I find that privately held companies tend to be better because the owner identifies personally with the business, it is “their baby”. They want to see it grow over their lifetime even if it means going slowly but steadily. With public companies the execs and board are brought in to increase profits regardless of the means and their timeframe is by the yearly quarter. There isn’t a strong mechanism to push them to focus on long term growth or stability. An exception are private tech startups that seem to focus on growing just enough to get the attention of a bigger company to give them a nice, fat offer and sell out and ditch the employees and customers.
Yeah, don’t expect me to pay Target prices if I’m getting the Wal-Mart experience.
Yup. Lack of employees and the “broken window effect”. People see unmaintained areas and it just snowballs from there. This aisle probably had a few slobs leave boxes open and later customers figured no one cared and they got lazy too.
Everything is a K-Mart these days.
Used to work retail so I feel this. Crazy thing is that sometimes it only takes one or two customers (and their gremlin children) to cause this kind of chaos. I’d go into fitting rooms and shit would be thrown all over the floors. Every now and then there would be extra surprises…like food or drink containers, or used diapers, or urine in the wastebasket. Fun times.
Some people are really disgusting and simply don’t care about others… it’s a shame, really and that’s the reasons we can’t have nice things.
I’m still in grocery retail and this is incredibly accurate. Corporate set expectations to be “Grand Opening Ready” throughout the entire day. Customers dig and dig through the produce department like there’s going to be a bag of salad that is magically better in the back of the case. If expiration dates went down to the second, they’d look for the furthest from expiry.
It’s super frustrating because we get 7 trucks a week for produce, so we have a very healthy turnover on our stuff.
This job has changed me (especially going through COVID in the South). People are animals.
I find the kind of behavior you’re describing as a sort of non-necessary survival mode behavior. They want to not just get the product they need, they want to get the best darn carton of strawberries in the entire batch. We’re not talking looking over a few cartons, we’re talking those people that will go through EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. That side of the spectrum. I feel like people who do this might be predisposed to hoarding tendencies or other obsessive disorders. Don’t get me wrong, fk those people, but I really want to believe there’s a reason behind the madness.
Well also, stores routinely push the items that expire the soonest to the front. I usually check the expiration dates on a few items and they can be quite different. Some items go bad and the store might still sell them up to the expiration date.
If they always kept the best quality in front, no one would dig. When they literally are trying to sell lower quality food, fuck em.
This is the most unfair part and it expands to many areas of life. You can have a whole bunch of decent and normal people and just a handful of douchebags make it bad for everyone.
I wonder if higher fines, maybe relative to the person’s income, would help or just lead to different problems…
Anecdotal, but it seemed like 80% of the time it was the poorer folks doing this shit. Have a sister with 4 kids, super close to welfare level and her and her kids do this shit (mostly her kids do this and she just lets them). Shes just tired and inattentive all the time. What I’ve noticed gets her attention is when a store clerk or other customer calls them out and shames them.
So public shaming may help the problem, but in today’s world some of these people may turn rabid Mama bear on you. Some stores make you count items on hangers going in and then going out. That actually might work. But I’d rather see societal behavior change instead.
Side note: My sister has worked years of retail before so no idea how tf she does this.
My husband worked retail for a long time. The ones who did this in his stores were always the ones well put together and well dressed with money.
Assholes come from all income levels.
I can agree with this. Assholes from all walks.
Is this only an American thing ? I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this in the European countries I’ve been in
Never seen it in continental Europe, but Primark is on a whole different level in the UK
Once you enter Primark, it’s MadMax rules
You have my interest
That is true, UK super- and hypermarkets were like this when I went to some of them. The attitude of customers is just weird.
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I work 4 on 4 off days then nights, which means I can go to the cinema off peak when there’s only a few other people there, it great.
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I still have ptsd from some primark shops in uk…
Scenes I saw are now how I picture the locust plague.
How can some people be so unaware of basic society rules?
I’ve never been into a Primark, but this looks very much like TK Maxx (which is what TJ Maxx is called here in the UK).
I’m American and I’ve never seen this in a Target ever. They must be severely understaffed at this location.
Same, the stores near me are never this bad
Right, the Targets where I live are pretty clean and maintained but other stores however, tend to look like the photo in OP. Like Forever 21 and Ross always look like a fucking mess.
It’s not an “American” thing. There are zero stores like this where I live. It’s a “wherever this store is” thing.
Me neither, nor do I ever think I’ve been to a shoe store that keeps boxes of shoes on the shelves like that. I’m used to display models; find something you like, then you ask an assistant what sizes you’d like to try on.
I’ve been to plenty of places with boxes on the shelves, and it’s always been fine.
I was in InterSport yesterday during their sale and some boxes were on the ground. But employees put them back into their correct places
I raise my hand- I’ve seen similar in Australia’s Targets and Kmarts, though I must admit that was years ago. I haven’t seen this much mess in yhe shoe section over the past couple years but I also haven’t been shopping for shoes there lately, so all I’m saying is it can happen here too.
Can confirm, did a mandatory highschool weeks work experience in kmart a few years back - was the only person who cared to clean up the shoes.
Nowadays the shoe section is clean af. However I dont necessarily think it’s due to the workers - more likely less customers shopping for shoes offline.
I don’t generally buy shoes from those stores anyway anymore, I have very small feet so the selection sucks, but also none of the shoes last very long. Id rather spend $100 on shoes that last rather then $25-35 on shoes that fall to pieces after a month or two of use.
But when I do shop for shoes in these stores, I make a point to put the rejects back where they are supposed to go. That one week burned into my brain how painful it is to put away a mountain of shoes that people just tossed aside. So I’ll do my part to not be apart of the problem, and to make it easier for our poor retail workers.
In general, I feel l like Europeans experience a healthy amount of shame in situations like these, like USians completely lack.
I’d lie awake at night for the rest of my life because of the shame I’d feel knowing I left something behind looking as trashed as that.
TK Max is like this.
Well it sort of us getting there. But I think the stores sort of encourage that behavior.
This tells you more about the people who go to buy shoes there… It takes 10 sec to put back the shoe to it’s box and the box to it’s place.
Even if it took 5 minutes. When I try on clothes, I usually bring back anything I dont want back to its original place and do my best to fold it/hang it how I found it.
I’ll pick clothes off the ground by racks and put things back on hangers while waiting for my wife to finish her shopping. lol
It’s still the stores responsibility to clean up the aisle after asshole customers like that.
…or kicking out anyone and everyone making a mess like that. That behavior is just not acceptable.
yeah but they desperately want that shitbags money so they’ll just kiss their ass instead. Retail is so fucked.
If you catch them in the act, sure. But if someone in the supermarket breaks a few glasses and fucks off, I still don’t expect to be walking through broken glass and spilled pickeld cucumbers when I go shopping an hour later. Someone has to clean that shit up, that’s part of running a store.
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Glasses is different than shoes
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It is the employees responsibility to make sure the store looks nice, sure. It’s basic human decency to respect people and not make them do bullshit tasks because you’re too lazy to put in the bare minimum.
You’d be agitated too if someone came to your work, threw all your shit on the floor and walked away. Now it’s your problem to deal with, but it didn’t need to be. Someone decided they wanted to choose being a cancer on society and make it your problem.
When I was a kid in a restaurant my mother (who had been a waitress) told me, “It’s their job to clean. It’s not their job to clean up after you. You need to understand those are different things.” Never forgot that.
Hold on, the maid will be by to clean up after you
What store has an isle? Like one of those chain surf shops, Alvin’s Island? Or did like Wal Mart the company buy a private Virgin Island?
Nobody likes a pedant
Nobody likes being wrong is more apt
I liked it and corrected the mistake.
Probably the same people who leave trash on the ground literally within a few feet of a trash can. Right up there with the people who drop bottles and cans (you were able to carry the full one), dump their car trash on the ground (saw a woman do this at a beach parking lot), etc.
Probably had shit parents who never taught them about basic respect and decency when they were growing up (which they’ll now pass on to the next generation of dropkicks they squeeze out)
Same people who don’t return the shopping cart. Absolute animals.
The customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is a douchebag.
Fun fact, that’s not even what “the customer is always right” is supposed to mean, although it’s how it’s used most I guess.
It was coined in relation to what shops should or should not stock - if customers wanted to buy something, then the shop should stock it, regardless of what they thought of the product.
It’s not meant to mean everything the customer says is correct.
That is still a stupid way of looking at that sentence.
Shops should stock whatever they want.
Just because shoes are suddenly all the rage doesn’t mean they should stock shoes at coffee shops.
We should change it to the “customer is not always a douchebag.”
Probably the same lazy slobs who leave frozen meat on random shelves in supermarkets because they changed their mind but are too lazy to put it back.
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A very large group of people are just awful people.
Check, where ‘very large’ can even be 2+ in worst case scenarios.
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Most single specimens are acceptable, but in groups they tend to get worse. (or at least a lot louder)
It also depends on your own ability to handle them though, in some cases here even encountering 1 is to many. (I like my space and quiet surroundings)
True. But some cultures produce a bigger proportion of “awful” people.
American. Can confirm.
Woah easy on the racism pal
I’m pretty sure “American” describes a mixing of a bunch of different races. Unfortunately not harmoniously enough.
“American” isn’t a race but the internet commenter love affair with shitting on the USA is kinda played out. We’re not perfect, sometimes we’re not even all that good but it takes a special kind of delusion to ignore our efforts to promote peace and stability over the past century or so.
An easy counterpoint would be things like forever wars in the Middle East, shady CIA bullshit pretty much anywhere they think they can get away with it and other agencies that probably know me more intimately than my proctologist. Generally, I’d agree that there’s a lack of effective oversight and some poor decision-making at play. There’s a lot of work to be done but our slow, drunken stumble is still moving toward a better future more often than not.
Speaking of the future: you’re probably the least corrupt of all the superpowers fucking the environment, but that’s not saying much. I think the US will need real democracy soon.
Least corrupt is a start, I’ll take it over some alternatives. Probably helps that our whistleblowers have a better than average survival/not-getting-disappeared rate and are often seen as heroes by the public. I don’t know what it’ll take to fix the rest of our issues, just hope to see a little less backsliding and more reasonable engagement while working out of this angsty teenager phase thing we’ve got going on.
Efforts to promote peace and stability?
The USA is the biggest weapon exporter and have been at war for about 95% of time it exists. They have been meddling in political affairs all over the world, setup puppet governments wherever they can, and deem foreigners as second class humans in their laws.
If that is your way of “promoting peace” please stop.
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I appreciate your input.
Reminds me of kmart in the 90’s.
Not quite as bad as the nightmare fodder that is 2010s Kmart.
I like the post apocalyptic Kmarts that are almost barren but there’s like one parked car out front and most of the windows are boarded up but the store is some how still open.
Is this normal? I’m in Canada and we would never ever leave things like that in a store.
Lol workers in america are not paid enough to give a shit.
In Britain, if you take something off the shelf and then decide you don’t want it, you put it back rather than just dropping it on the floor.
Despite their being no punishment for being a dirty, lazy bastard. Nor a reward for being tidy and considerate for the people that come after you, it’s basic self governance that makes things nicer for everyone.
Whats the minimum wage in briton anways?
Is the store clean and nice when you got there?
Cuz that was probably the employees.
If i a customer, get to a target shoe department and its really messed up should I clean it?
That’s absolutely not what I’m saying.
I’m saying that if we all clean up after ourselves, this situation never happens, it’s nicer for everyone and there is simply no need to clear up after someone else.
if we all clean up after ourselves, this situation never happens Do you think I am 5 years old? Obvisouly people should clean up thier messes.
But preteneding the employees at target had nothing to do with the Ilse being clean in bullshit.
Tell me what is the minimum wage in your country?
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Don’t blame the consumer, blame target for not hiring/paying for staff.
American: shits all over the toilet floor despite a toilet being right there “that’s disgusting, they need to hire more toilet cleaners!!” Probably leaves without washing their hands because there’s no designated staff for hand cleaning and heads off to McDonald’s to go buy more burgers.
Absolutely shameful attitude.
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Americans love the “Brits have bad teeth” meme, I’m sure you can handle a couple of obesity jokes.
Last I checked, Americans weren’t a protected class. Has this changed? 🤔
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Uh, no. It’s not in my mind; it’s a legal definition, and exists for a reason. Cope.
Yeah pretty much yeah
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Yeah Idiocracy is already here
I mean… blame both. just because there’s cleaners you shouldn’t mess the place.
America is a country where people don’t want to put their shopping carts back in the return because “there’s people paid for that!” Yet when Aldi introduced the 25¢ return mechanism, suddenly they’re OK with the idea of returning the cart. That’s the price of American laziness and selfishness, 25¢.
It’s absolutely shameful behaviour that results from an extremely selfish and narrow viewed mindset, akin to that of a young child that has a vague understanding of the consequences of their actions but simply doesn’t care about them because they know someone else is going to make up for their bad attitude.
If you think it is bad at Target, go to the local Walmart.
Target is quickly turning into the new walmart
Depends on if the Target is in the ghetto too like many Walmarts are near.
In my case, every nearby target is a neighbor to a next-door Walmart.
It’s a choose-your-own-adventure type of ghetto around here :)
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Literally every big box store in the US
places like Forever 21 also often look like this.
A lot of retailers tbh - people don’t take time to clean up after themselves for whatever reason
You ever see someone do it in person? Shit is so wild to watch someone just drop something on the ground, and then just turn and leave like it didn’t even happen. They don’t even give it a second thought.
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I’ve never seen the one in my town like this. Yes, it’s in the USA.
This is how a couple of my local targets are in all sections all the time. Thankfully it’s not all of the targets so I can go to one of the decent ones if I need something
