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Retail Workers Share Their Best 'You Can't Make This Up!' Experiences

Reddit user Professional_Song419 asked: 'Redditors who worked in retail, what are your "you can't make this up" stories?'

No matter how entertaining they might be, sometimes you hear someone tell a story, and you just know that they're making it up for laughs, gasps, or attention.

But sometimes, a person will share something with you that's so unusual that there's just no way you could make it up, especially in certain workplaces like retail.


Curious, Redditor Professional_Song419 asked:

"Redditors who worked in retail, what are your 'You can't make this up' stories?"


Code Yellow

"Target we have a 'Code Yellow' for missing kids. The whole team drops what they are doing and we all help. Usually, the child is found within minutes."

"One case on a slow night the missing boy, 10, could not be found. The parent is frantic and getting more frantic."

"'Would he have gone to the car on his own?' I offer. Which got me screamed at about he would never, and he’s been kidnapped, and I’m not taking things seriously."

"He had gone out to the car on his own."

- Whitealroker1

"Home Depot, and we also have a code yellow... Everyone's searching for this kid. Turns out he had to go to the washroom so he scaled to the second level of shelving and went potty in the display toilets."

- Rhueless

Math Problems

"Best Buy. A lady comes in with a 10 percent off coupon and asks me how much it'll get her off on an 80-dollar antenna."

"I explain eight dollars, to which she is surprised, and angrily picks the 50-dollar one."

"While ringing her up, she asks why the antenna is 45 dollars, and when I explain how 10 percent off works again, she replies, 'I thought you said eight dollars."

- TheNutsFlush21

"Also Best Buy. A lady came in and was looking at 'The Sims.' She was annoyed because she had looked at it the previous week and it was cheaper before. I explained that prices change every Sunday and the previous week, the game had a special promotion going on."

"She said, 'Well now I know something about how Best Buy does business,' and stomped away."

- GmorkFromNothing

Locked Up

"I once accidentally locked a pregnant woman in the store to take my break."

"I was working the store in the mall alone, and we were just in a rush. Everyone cleared out I locked the gate to take my dinner break."

"When I came back 15 minutes later, a security guard was trying to figure out how to get her out. Apparently, she was in the fitting rooms and I didn't realize it."

"She was so mad, naturally, and let me know she was going to complain to corporate."

"I called my manager after she left to own up to my mistake before she heard from the customer. Later, the customer called me after she calmed down and let me know she wasn't going to tell on me and asked me to be more careful next time."

"The manager let me go the next day due to my own admission."

- italiangel24

Spooky Tunes

"I was working retail at a Sam Goodies record store many years ago and training a young girl at the cash register. She was very quiet and shy. It was her first job ever and she was very very nervous."

"An older gentleman came up to the counter with a cassette tape that he was very excited about. Apparently,he had been looking for it for quite some time and had finally found it at our store."

"In his excitement, as he spoke, his dentures popped out of his mouth, bounced across the counter, and hit this young trainee right in the waist."

"She let out a screech, threw her hands in the air, and jumped backwards about five feet."

"The old gentleman yelled, 'Aww s**t'... reached across the counter, grabbed his dentures, and popped them right back in. The whole event took about three seconds."

"It was hilarious... but this young girl was just shaking like a leaf and in disbelief at what had just happened to her."

"It was hilarious."

- YELLOW_TOAD

Adjustable Antiques

"My first job other than babysitting or casual household labor as a teenager was at an antique store. Mostly I just came in after school to dust and vacuum, help with heavy lifting, etc. But if the owner had an errand, I was fully in charge. It was quite a nice job."

"One afternoon, a lady came in to shop. She brought her notebook, and borrowed my measuring tape when she found a dining room table that suited her style."

"She said, 'I would like to order this table, but four inches longer.'"

"Um... I said, 'Ma'am, we aren't sourcing our European antiques from a workshop, you know? I can refer you to someone who could build a reasonable facsimile to your specifications, but there's literally no way for me to order what you want.'"

"An absolute s**t fit was thrown."

"Apparently, she called my boss the next day. Boss suffered no fools, didn't need money, and only opened the shop because her husband retired and boss didn't want to stay home with him all day."

"I don't know exactly what was said on the call, but I got a 20 dollar bill slipped into my hand, the way grandmothers do it, when I got to work that afternoon. She said, 'Baby, you earned this for putting up with that old b***h.'"

"And 20 dollars was real money circa 1985!"

- Flashy_Watercress398

A Shoplifting Spree

"Two ladies were doing a bold shoplifting spree... Tcity police were at every store exit, waiting for them to leave the premises. Store security was tracking them through the store. We were told to leave them totally alone if they came into our area."

"Sure enough, here they came into my area."

"One woman was pushing a stroller with a little boy in it, approximately two years old."

"The other one was pushing one of those old-fashioned baby carriages (like from the 1920s) with a blanket thrown over it. I heard later that someone had asked her about her baby, and she said it had breathing problems and needed privacy, thus the blanket over the entire carriage."

"They shopped all three floors of our store, filling up the carriage, any room in the stroller, and filling girdles under their clothes, getting physically larger the more time they spent in the store."

"They finally attempted to return to their car with $5000+ worth of merchandise and were stopped by police."

"Rumor has it they even had 16 pairs of earrings stuffed into their underpants. The baby that has breathing problems was revealed to be a plastic baby doll."

- Delsym_Wiggins

Seriously, Do Not Open!

"My sister worked at a craft store for her first job out of high school. One day, they had a bird in their store. No one could catch it, it would always fly away and perch on a high place in the store out of reach. It was in there for a couple of days when it finally got too weak to fly very high anymore."

"My sister finally was able to approach it and offered it water and it drank it out of a bottlecap. My sister grabbed it and put it in a small cardboard box so it could rest and regain its strength for release."

"She put the box in the break room and wrote on it, 'DO NOT OPEN! BIRD INSIDE!'"

"Later that day, they were in the break room and one of her coworkers walked in and opened the box, releasing the bird again."

"My sister asked her why she opened the box and she replied that she thought it was a prank or something. Thankfully the bird was only confined to the break room and my sister caught it again and immediately released it outside and it flew away."

"'DO NOT OPEN! BIRD INSIDE!' became a meme among her friends and coworkers. Emails with 'DO NOT OPEN' attachments that were just a goofy bird picture or gif, actual boxes with 'Do not open' on them that contained stuffed bird toys or bird figurines. She left that job some months later, but she left an impact!"

- robo-dragon

Rage Cleaning

"We had a lady come in, disgusted at the state of the store (she was on her hands and knees looking under the racking), she left and came back with plastic bags, gloves, a mask, and cooking tongs. She proceeded to start pulling dust bunnies out from under the permanent racking."

"She asked for a broom, to which I politely obliged. End of the day (store closing), I walked her out and thanked her for bringing this to our attention. Never saw her again."

"The manager called me an a**hole for letting her go on like that. She wasn't bugging anyone and she seemed calmer the more she did this."

"The whole thing went on for about three hours."

- SleeplessBlueBird

"I mean, free cleaning, and she may have been having a bad day and just needed something other than her probably spotless house to clean. I'm glad you left her to it."

- mightgrey

A Lie All Along

"We had an employee whose daughter died. We sent her flowers, gave her time off, told her to come back when she was ready, etc. She then came back a few weeks later working shortened hours with a 'support friend' by her side. She soon got fired for letting the 'support friend' use the services for free."

"A couple of months later- she came in as a customer and HER DAUGHTER (who had died) WAS SITTING IN THE CAR PLAYING ON AN IPAD. We called her out immediately- it was awkward."

- OwnSpinach5286

"Oh, not retail, but at my previous company we had an employee that pulled the 'sick kid in hospital dying card' so he could get time off for vacations during holidays when we were always slammed."

"He did it twice before HR asked for documentation and terminated him for job abandonment."

- sardoodledom_autism

Just For Looks

"While scanning groceries, I heard a loud commotion, which included a shopping cart colliding with the service desk and two people rushing out of the store. My manager came around shaking her head and I couldn’t help but ask what happened."

"Apparently, someone stole a display model of a microwave and tried to return it, saying that “they bought a faulty microwave” but didn’t have a receipt or even the box it came in."

"My manager had heard about the theft earlier in the day and squinted her eyes at the story about how this microwave had no cord and was extremely light to pick up, leading her to ask straight out if they were the ones who stole the microwave—hence them storming out of the store pretty quick."

- EatinCheesePizza

Dark Humor To The Rescue!

"Worked at a pet store and a dude brought in a dead fish and demanded that I, 17-year-old kid, tell him how his fish died. If that wasn’t funny enough, a bystander rescued me by asking, 'Don’t you have a fish autopsy kit?!?' It was funny enough to get the dead fish dude to leave me alone."

- VonYellow

No Patience To Be Found

"I started working when my store was very understaffed. So understaffed that the managers were doing cashier work."

"I had to use the restroom once in the middle of my shift, and apparently, while I was in there some Karen got in a snit with the manager at the register."

"So I come out of the restroom to catch the tail end of the argument. Important to note here is that managers and cashiers wore different colored shirts, and it was just me and a bunch of managers that day."

"So I come out from the back, in a shirt that is colored differently from everyone else at the counter, and the lady locks onto me. She starts lecturing me, a cashier, about keeping my employees in line, making sure they respect customers, and all that jazz. She's telling me to discipline my managers, in particular my boss, who she was arguing with."

"Finally, she runs out of air, and leaves in a huff. I look at my boss, he looks at me."

"I said, 'She thought I was the manager.'"

"We both bust out laughing... and the lady comes back inside, screaming about us thinking she was a joke. We de-escalate, I apologized and she leaves, but I never forgot about that."

- TeddyBearToons

Work Before Wellness

"20 years back I was working at Walmart and someone asked me to hold a ladder so they could change the pricing on the sign, this was suspended over the photo center."

"Well, as he went to change a number the hook or whatever holding it up let go, the entire sign made out of heavy metal and plastics smashed me right in the face, somehow missed my nose and I was left with an inch gash above my upper lip and a tear on the right side that of my nose where it’s like connected. I have scars now."

"The hr person asked me to come in a few days later to sign “paperwork so I could return to work when I was better” and it was a return to work form, they bait and switched me and had me back working several days later with stitches still in my face and my lip swollen like a golf ball."

"F**k Walmart."

- w1bz

So Groovy!

"I worked at a retail store at the mall for a winter break in college. They are known for selling bachelorette party stuff and crap for your dorm room."

"They had recently been bought out by a larger company and changed their inventory system. Whenever a product was sold, they would ship four more of the exact product. The problem was that they had a sale on lava lamps just before Thanksgiving. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, we had lava lamps stacked floor to ceiling in the back room. We didn't want them there and we also didn't want to sell more too."

"I had to go back to college after the break so I'm not sure if/when the inventory system was fixed and what they ended up doing with hundreds of lava lamps."

- Confidence_Man2

Mind-Numbingly Strange Encounters

"I worked in customer service at well-known superstore. A few times I had moments of just complete brain shutting down shock at some of the sh*t people tried to pull."

"The most memorable was coming back from break I’d go through all the clothing areas to avoid customers. I went around a corner and bumped into a lady in the shoe aisle with an armful of boxes. I helped her pick up the boxes she dropped and went back to the service counter."

"About three minutes later, that same woman walked up, put the boxes on the counter, and said she’d like to return them. I kind of stopped and stared at her. I told her I just saw her bring them directly from the floor over to here. She repeated she wanted to return them. I didn’t get paid enough to argue so I keyed in the code for a manager, made the return for her (like $200 on a gift card), and off she went. The manager and loss prevention got her before she made it out the door."

"Another time two guys came in to pick up a moneygram. He showed a Cali license so I asked what he was doing all the way in Iowa. He told me he was on the run from the law. I just laughed and dismissed it as a joke."

"20 minutes later a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts cuts to the front of the line puts a badge down and tells me he’s a U.S. Marshall. I told him I thought the guy was joking about being on the run and the Marshall says, 'He actually told you that!?'"

"Anyway they pulled me to go speak with the store manager so he can let her know they will be arresting the guy as soon as he left the store. I ask if I can watch and the Marshall says sure why not and the store manager tells me to get my ass back to work lol didn’t get to see it go down."

- whatingobsname


From accidents to audacity, there's no question why these were the strangest, funniest, and most unbelievable moments in a retail worker's experience. There's also no doubt that these were just strange enough that they were undoubtedly true!

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