In my experience, many people in that state of alienated frustration are largely looking for some kind of human validation. Obviously they're still mostly looking for toothpaste, but by the time they get shuffled around to a few people and start to really feel the cold institutional absurdity of it all, they can be pleasantly surprised to hear an employee tell them something along the lines of "I agree, this is bullshit." Even if you can't help them, a little commiseration can go a long way.
Yeah if both of you are in mind if a crappy situation is just gonna create another crappy situation when you cross paths.
Unfortunately capitalism puts you in a crunch, having to balance school and work so much, as well as the woman, since Target needs to inconvenience her lest the dastardly shoplifters get the upper hand
Commiseration is a rare thing and may well be very welcome. It's rare even here sometimes.
Sounds like you're being way too hard on yourself. Imagine this happened to your coworker, would you have thought they should be criticized for it? Probably not right
Zero patience or sympathy for people who are rude to grocery workers
You did nothing wrong. Not even the nervous laughter thing. I have years of retail experience behind me and my main takeaway lesson from it is sympathy and patience for retail workers, because in all but a few very rare occasions, the customers were the assholes. :solidarity:
I'm a former retail worker. Looking back on it, every day I didn't wear an explosive vest to work meant I did enough for that shithole and the customers.
This is a joke FBI man I don't want to blow up stores. I would never harm my lovely former coworkers. But seriously Target shouldn't exist and nobody should be subjected to working there, so any performance you make for them is enough. She should have gotten mad at Target because they're terrified of losing $3 tubes of toothpaste and willing to inconvenience literally everyone including themselves to prevent a few people from stealing their way to good dental hygiene.
I have a nervous laughter thing that I can’t control in really uncomfortable situations
:joker-troll:
Could've been more toward perfect, but what can't?
You're fine. Don't hold yourself to your standard of perfection - you're certainly not holding the Busy Shopper to it
Putting toothpaste behind a lock is pretty dystopian shit. That's a basic necessity, it's not expensive, and so far as I know doesn't have any uses that would lead someone to steal it aside from someone needing to brush their teeth.
Am I missing some other use? Or is this just evil?
PS sorry op that sucks and it's not your fault at all. You were put into a shitty situation because target decided to put a cheap basic necessity behind a lock and not give keys to everyone.
tfw it's a restricted product specifically because it addresses a basic need. a lot of stores do the same thing with deodorant and baby food.
Anything that goes missing more than normal gets put in the security cage. They call it "inventory shrinkage" and they can track it precisely these days. Shoplifters steal anything they can resell, it's not because they need clean teeth. If it makes you feel any better, the biggest source of shrinkage is employee theft, not shoppers.
The real problem was locking things up and then nobody has the key or knows who has the key. If you wanted to make a stink you could escalate it up to corporate and someone would get chewed out for it.
The real problem was
You have a point except I would reserve this phrasing for the fact that capitalism's wealth inequality makes shoplifting make sense.
You did absolutely nothing wrong, she was being a piece of shit
You have to maintain zero tolerance for anti-worker behavior like that (as far as you can get away with it depending on who your boss is)
Aways remember no matter what corporates or bootlickers say, YOU are doing them a service not the other way around and respect and fuck yeah even deference from customers should follow from that
sounds like two people unwittingly caught up in the absurd day to day machinations of :amerikkka: so don't sweat about it, she probably realized that you were laughing at this after she left, not at her personally
eh, i can see why she was angry, but it wasn't you who decided to put the toothpaste in a cage :shrug-outta-hecks:
The only way I can work retail is if I am so fucking high that there is at least a 2 second gap between people's bullshit and when my brain is aware of it. It seems to smooth things over.
Love the whole mentality of approaching a busy cashier with a queue going and demanding they drop everything to help you with the problem they told you they don't have the solution to
It's like whenever people here are slightly inconvenienced, they drop all pretenses of maturity and revert to a child's empathy
I got fired from walmart once. Apparently, "This is a walmart it isn't that serious" isn't an appropriate responce to a manager.
Can't tell you how often I've felt this way at all the jobs I've worked at over the years. You don't get paid enough to care this much, calm the fuck down.
Protip: don't do it. It isn't really that emotionally validating in the end.
The way she was treating you wasn't cool, and she shouldn't have put you on the spot.
