Adventures in Retail (Being a teenager at K-Mart in the 90's)

Everything else
1

Recently, Sears is apparently imploding, and while talking about it closing, it brought to mind my own experiences in retail, back in the early 1990’s. Folks suggested they might like to hear some of these stories, so here we go. I suspect I’ll just write one story at a time, and post them here if folks enjoy the first ones.

Some background:
In the early 1990’s, I was a teenager in the suburbs of Philadelphia. One summer, I needed a job, and a buddy had recently gotten one at the local K-Mart. I figured, “Hey, I can work there and hang out with Josh, and earn some money.” It was a solid plan. I was 16. In retrospect, when thinking about our actions as 16 year old kids, I believe that I was functionally retarded. Some (many) of these stories involve me being an idiot. (In a more primitive, less profound manner than my current, adult-level idiocy)

In the early 1990’s, K-Mart was less trashy than it is now. But it was still trashy. I believe that back in the 80’s it was a reasonably respectable store, and there were kind of remnants of that? For instance, there was a little restaurant place at the front where you could get sandwiches and stuff, and I vaguely recall getting a hot dog there when I was a really little kid, but at this point in K-Mart’s operation I don’t even recall it being open. I kind of think it was, but it was like food you’d get at a gas station. Not a place like Sheetz, but like, a hot-dog that’s been rotating on a machine for perhaps months if not years. Not things you would want to eat. There were pictures of food and stuff up on the walls, which were clearly from the 60’s and 70’s, if not earlier. The place had a distinctly “old” feel to the place, and not in a good way. The store itself was essentially that old, slowly rotating hot-dog. Maybe if you were really hungry, or drunk, you’d eat it. But no one was really going out of their way to get one.

The store was populated by a cast of characters who could only be described as “Colorful.” I’ll get to the highlights, but first, I will start off with Pete.

Pete: Backroom Stockboy
There were a few different groups that worked at the store. Some worked up front, some worked in the back. I worked up front, working in customer service, working the register, stuff like that. Pete worked in the back, where I honestly have no idea what they really did. I think a lot of drugs, which I mention not something which differentiated them at all from those of us working in the front, but is simply the only thing that I know they did. Also, they had a gigantic cardboard box compacter which was also periodically used to crush things which were not cardboard. It was like an early version of “Will it Blend?”

Anyway, one thing that both folks in the front and the back got tasked with, was retrieving shopping carts from the parking lot. This was usually a pretty cush job, as you didn’t have to talk to customers, and really just involved wandering around the parking lot while smoking cigarettes. Also, you got bungie-cords, which were used to connect the carts together as you stacked them and pushed them back to the store. Remember this. It is key.

Pete was a kind of fat kid, who always wore T-Shirts with various bands on them, usually with his belly hanging out. You know, metallica, AC-DC, etc. Sometimes wolves howling at the moon. He wore glasses, and had a mullet. So imagine that, with a red K-Mart vest.

One day, I’m out front getting carts from the parking lot. I’ve been taking my time, and had just brought a bunch of them back from the lot and pushed them into little corral thing where they sat next to the store. I didn’t really feel like going in and doing work at a register, and figured I could just kind of slack off before anyone really noticed, so I was chilling out there smoking a cigarette. This was right next to the door of the store.

All of a sudden, the door opens, and some dude starts booking it out of the store, carrying a box (I don’t totally recall what it was… I want to say a radio or boombox or something). I, being the idiot kid I was, just kind of watch this happen, thinking, “that guy seems to be in a hurry.” From inside the store I recall hearing Raj (one of the front managers, I’ll talk about later) yelling, “Stop that guy!”

All of a sudden, Pete comes rushing out the door. Pete is not fast. Pete is “husky”. Pete looks over at me, and at the guy running away. Now, Pete usually had bungie cords on him, rather than using the ones that those of us up front shared when we needed to get carts. He had them hanging around his neck. I think maybe there were other “back of the store” tasks that required them, but as we said, I have no idea about that. Anyway, he takes a bungie cord from around his neck, and swinging it like a south american cowboy swinging a set of bolos, just whips it at this guy running away.

What happened next is something that seems fantastical. But it did in fact happen. I saw it happen with my own eyes.

The bungie cord flew through the air, maybe 20 feet, and hit this guy in the back of the neck. Then it wrapped around the guy’s head, and the two hook pieces eventually smacked him right in the face. The guy screamed, tripped, and fell on his (bungie wrapped) face. Pete trundled after him like an bear wearing a tiny jacket in a circus, leaped into the air, and brought his considerable girth down upon the poor thief.

Pete then grabbed the guy’s arms, pulled him up, and started pushing him back towards the store. The guy wasn’t even fighting at this point. He was stunned, and all messed up from tripping on the pavement and then having Pete crush him into it. I just watched all this happen, awe-struck.

As they passed me, I said, “Holy SHIT Pete! That was fucking amazing!” Pete was beaming. This was his finest fucking hour. Hell, that may have literally been the crowning achievement of his entire life. And it seriously was amazing. I don’t think he could have done that again if he tried, unless maybe practicing advanced bungie tricks was the thing they did in the back room all day.

Anyway, the guy was apparently trying to shoplift whatever it was he had. They held him there for a while while the cops showed up, who then took him away. This was not the only time I saw cops at K-Mart. Everyone was talking about how Pete caught the guy, and I told them about the bungie bolo toss, because I don’t think anyone would have believed Pete if he had told them. As I said, I think that was probably one of the greatest days of Pete’s life. He was a hero for that day, catching a thief, performing Achillean acts of athleticism.

And this was a thing that happened at K-Mart, in 1994.

2

I never worked retail but I did work in a hospital as a teenager. I could tell you stories that would curl your hair.

3

Retail stories! YESSSSSSSSSSS!

4

Pete’s heroics would be all over YouTube these days. Truly a hero from another age.

He’d probably also get his ass sued but still…hero!

5

Other folks can feel free to add in their own retail based stories here.

6

Posting in an epic thread!

(am I doing that right?)

7

That was amazing. MORE PLEASE.

8

I knew people that worked in McDonald’s in the early 70’s. The things they told me would freak you out. You know they used to get the pickles in a large barrel and well…

9

My retail horror stories:

In the late 1980s, I worked at a Radio Shack in NJ in the summers between college. There was an AMAZING amount of criminal and just plain scummy behavior among the store managers in the region. Over a few years I saw:

  1. Manager using VHS machines up front to dub and then sell porno tapes. More than once a customer turned on a TV and was greeted with a face full of Traci Lords’ body parts. Especially illegal since she was underage when the movies were made.

  2. Managers who illegally sold stock from the back room, then wrote it down as lost to water damage or other similar insurable event. Also lots of stuff that fell off the truck before delivery somehow.

  3. Married (to other people) managers fucking on an air mattress in the back room while the rest of us were running in/out around them trying to do our jobs. Actually saw this at multiple stores and with people married to one another but sleeping with others. Maybe they were exhibitionists in open marriages. Who knows or cares. I just knew there was a risk of tripping over unexpected naked bodies when going to the back to get stock.

  4. Manager sticking a dumb college kid (that’d be me) with his job and going on vacation for 2 weeks. I worked open to close plus financial reconciliation & depost 7 days a week; it was something insane like 80+ hours each week. In retrospect, I was a very poorly paid and unqualified idiot who thought he was making good money. Should have told the guy to go jump. Pretty certain I did a better job than he ever did too

  5. Salespeople who happily pushed whatever crap had sales incentives & kick-backs to customers who really needed something else. This was more or less the extended warranty shtick of the era. I REALLY tried to be honest & do what was best for the customer even if it meant sending them to another store or competitor for something else. I made fewer sales than the sleaze bags and learned that I didn’t want to be in sales when I got a real job.

I also learned that I never ever wanted a job requiring you to inventory a store full of tiny capacitors.

…and I developed a healthy fear of elderly people asking me for their free shitty battery of the month :-)

Diego

10

I’ve told this one before, but I think it’s good enough for this thread.

After I left the Army and before I started my current career, I took a job at Target. This was in 2001. Hey, anything to pay the bills, right? In my three years there, they had me manage the back room in charge of the overnight receiving and stock team, on the floor in charge of housewares, and in the front in charge of the checkout lanes. The lanes were the worst because that’s where you had to work with customers all day, and they can be terribly rude to retail workers.

The front lane job mostly consisted of balancing the schedule and work hours of the checkers, managing customer flow, (making sure a lane didn’t get overwhelmed) and assisting with customer service issues. Target is a slight step up from places like KMart or Walmart, but it’s still big box retail, which means most customer service blowouts were from drunk, high, or crazy people yelling about something that was outside of our control. For example, you can explain very carefully that Target did not have a price-matching policy, but customers will always insist that yes you did last week and is this because I’m black and fuck y’all for trying to diss me in front of my kids. Generally, I think people have a lot of pent up rage and retail employees seem to be a good target for their ire.

Anyway, one day I get the call from the customer service desk, “Nick please come to CS for a request.” Uh-oh. This was almost never good. When the CS desk had to call a manager over, it meant CS either couldn’t help the customer further due to corporate policy, or the customer wanted to complain about something bonkers like the (patently false) viral news they read that Target hated military vets. Whatever it was, they uttered the dread phrase, “I need to speak to your manager.” Lucky me.

When I walked over, I was confronted by a 60-ish Caucasian lady. “One of your people back there was cursing like a sailor, and I need you to do something about it!” She gestured towards the back of the store where the fitting rooms and women’s clothing department was set. “Mother-blank this and mother-blank that. Just horrible!”

“Oh!” Frankly, I was a little shocked. Obviously, it was retail, so they weren’t hiring with the cream of the crop for the regular employees, but Target rarely had issues with its team members cursing or being bad around customers. “I’m really very sorry, Ma’am!”

I put on my best face and hoped I could find and discipline the errant team member. “Did you happen to see the person’s nametag, or can you give me a description?”

“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t one of the employees. It was one of your people. You know…”

She leaned in.

“A Mexican.”

11

I’d love to know how you replied. I like to think it was something like, “Thanks for letting me know, I’ll talk to them at the next meeting.”

My wife worked at Target right around that same time period as a team lead, and she hated her job every day. I never worked retail myself, not at a store or anything (my first job was as a part time custodian at the high school I went to, and then I worked at an appliance store helping install washers, dryers, ovens, fridges, and the like, then I was out of college and working IT), but it really is a thankless job. I try to be kind to the associates I interact with, I know how tough it is just seeing my wife go through it.

12

I have to admit that my wits failed me. I was a little shocked. I think I murmured something about letting HQ know. Lame, I know.

13

Holy shit Nick. Wow.

14

That’s some crazy shit right there.

15

This thread rocks. MOAR.

-Tom

16

I’m going to throw in a couple working in a gas station stories since it’s a form of retail and before self service things were different.

There was the time I got interviewed by Chicago police detectives. An infamous case here involving the abduction of a woman. She was later found dead in the trunk of the guy’s car in … O’Hare? No, I think a parking garage. I wish she had made some noise when I was filling the guy’s car up with gas. I don’t think I remembered much about him (the perp), but the detectives told me they might have me testify (never happened). [Thinking back on it, it was probably her car, and she might have already been dead which would have meant she couldn’t make any noise.]

I also love self deprecating humour. I had a mix of responsibilities, chiefly manning the driveway (filling up cars, checking oil fluids tire pressure whatever while that was going on). But I was also becoming a mechanic and working on cars. Another of my responsibilities was tire repair. In this station, we had a cast iron (think solid as, well, iron and immovable) drive up alignment rack, next to the tire repair machine. I’m repairing a tire, minding my own business, nobody else around me. I take the tire off the machine (it was repaired and re-inflated at that point). I roll the tire over to the alignment rack and for some reason sit down on it with my legs hanging down, meeting the floor. I bounce the tire on the floor, spinning it, a few times. I miscalculate the spin, the tire comes back at me and smashes my balls against the cast iron alignment rack. I am literally crippled up with pain trying to breathe for, I dunno, at least a couple minutes. I think I collapsed on my side to the ground. Customers are driving up to the pumps, I’m supposed to be greeting them over there and servicing them, but I can’t move or talk. My co-workers (and bosses) are going, “Where’s Nick?” I guess it’s not too odd I remember that day from 40 years ago so well, that was certainly the worst shot to the nads I ever took.

17

Here are some bookstore stories. I worked for one of the big national chains for about eight years. Not the one that folded. The other one, the noble one. I started there after getting a B.A. in English, barely, and having no career prospects and facing a wintry economic climate, was glad to get a part-time, then full-time job surrounded by books. I wound up working three years at a suburban location and then five years at a downtown store after moving to the big city. Eventually I became disgruntled at the increased importance Corporate was putting on selling membership cards and other nonsense, and wanted to get a job where the annual raise would be more than an increased shiny quarter per hour. But I’m still close to many friends I made there, and have many great memories of the two stores.

I’m not saying I blame this particular thread, but news came yesterday that the downtown location is closing down in the next few months. Hopefully we’ll have some kind of reunion before it’s replaced by some crappy restaurant or Apple store.

Anyway, some stories:

  • I once found a book that a customer was looking for. She could only describe it as a novel with a blue cover.

  • We used to take personal checks, but because of frequent scams and whatnot, required a photo ID. Once a guy came up with a book and paid with a check. I asked him for his driver’s license. He looked a bit startled. I explained the policy. “No habla ingles,” he gasped. I look at the guy. Blond hair, blue eyes. I look at the name on the check. It was something like Bob Anderson. I look at the book he was buying, Sure enough, it was in English. I suspected this guy actually spoke English. I tried explaining in my best high school Spanish that I needed to see a driver’s license. I knew what he’s doing and he knew what he’s doing, but the art of retail means the customer is always right. Eventually I called up a manager, who cleared me to make a one-time-only exception in our check-taking policy. I rang up the non-English speaker. He grinned and said, “Is December too soon for an April Fool’s joke?” Asshole.

  • Another guy came in for a special order. He said his name was John Smith and had ordered how-to books from Paladin Press with titles like “International Fugitive” and “How to Live Off The Grid”. Yes, he paid in cash.

  • One of the worst aspects of the job was going through the restrooms to make sure some of our loyal customers hadn’t passed out in the stalls because of an excess of heroin or mouthwash, or were jacking off to our artier magazines that they hadn’t purchased. In retrospect, it is a weird thing to make eye contact with a dude sitting on the toilet. One time I had to wheel the mop bucket in there to take care of someone’s explosion. After mopping up all the vomit, I started pushing the bucket back to the janitor’s closet. As the bucket went from tile to carpet, it tipped over, spreading dirty water all over the entrance to the bathroom. Luckily the carpet soaked a lot of it up, and I had a mop in my hands to handle the rest.

  • One time I was helping a co-worker with a book return. She did something odd, like hand the customer the wrong receipt back. I was about to call her on it when she suddenly slumped against my chest. I didn’t have the presence of mind to, y’know, catch her, so she slid off me and, knocking over a stool, collapsed on the floor. She then started convulsing. Seizure! I told another co-worked to call 911 then held her steady until her brain rebooted. I’d never seen anything like looking into dead eyes, then watch consciousness glimmer and flare up again in them.

  • Shoplifting was a problem, as were scammers. Sometimes organized rings of assholes would come in, steal books, then return them, sometimes for cash. Changing corporate return policies helped a lot. These thieves didn’t care as much about store credit. We also had uniformed off-duty police in the store. They were happy to stand around, making forty bucks an hour, occasionally manhandling the belligerent drunk or thief caught read-handed (sorry). Usually when a shoplifter was caught, they were banned from the store on pain of a trespassing charge. Sometimes they’d be brought in and charged, but that was rare. Once I spotted a guy pushing a wheeled cart through the store. No crime in that, it’s like having a mule for urban living, but we gave him extra attention. Sure enough, he was ransacking the leather journals, slipping them into his cart. The journals were barely concealed by garbage bags lining the cart’s wire mesh… When our cop that night nabbed him, we totaled up how much this guy was stealing. It wound up being in the thousands of dollars, which meant this guy was facing a felony charge instead of a misdemeanor.

  • One of my favorite perks was the occasional celebrity encounter. Sometimes they would be there for signings; sometimes they’d just be in town, bored, and need a book or a magazine to get them through the crushing dullness of Minneapolis. I once drifted around the store on a glorious haze because Danica McKellar, one of my first childhood crushes (Winnie Cooper, guys! Winnie Cooper!), was wandering around the store with her then-husband. I couldn’t work up the courage to bother her though. Nor did I gush over Bruce Springsteen… to his face. I did tell Ethan Coen how much I enjoyed his movies, but that was after annoying him with my membership card spiel. I once told our county attorney to get in the back of the line; she was coming through the line’s exit, not the entrance. Now that woman is our U.S. senator. The time Pete Townsend came to the store was something else, though.

  • So there’s this English musician named Rachel Fuller. Rachel makes perfectly lovely music for English housewives that is not my cup of tea. Apparently she and her boyfriend, rock icon Pete Townshend, were friends with the brothers that were, respectively, CEO and president of this bookstore chain. Rachel had a new CD out, and somehow worked out a deal with her bookstore-owning friends that she would go to a few of their stores, play a quick set, and reap the benefits in record sales. Her boyfriend would tag along for moral support. Word got out to the local classic rock station that the bookstore was going to have a free Pete Townshend concert. This was not actually the truth, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?

The day of the Rachel Fuller/PETE TOWNSHEND concert, I’m helping a friend in the music department ring up customers. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her talking to a tall scruffy-looking guy. I see him hand her something and say “afterwards, look at this. It will explain everything.” Then he left. He had given her a CD-ROM. I asked what that was about, and she summons the manager and cop on duty. The guy had told her that Pete Townshend had stolen one of his songs and owed him an enormous amount of money (I regret my memory fails me as to how much money he wanted. The guy was sure that Townshend owed him a very specific sum, like sixty-one thousand dollars or two hundred grand, or something) and “after twenty-nine years, it will finally come to an end.” Well, that sounded like some sort of threat, didn’t it? Some kind of imminent deadly threat to a celebrity? The cop was on it. The crazed fan had left the store, but our cop started reviewing security footage with an alacrity I had never before seen him use. He was able to take the crazy’s image, get it to the police department downtown. Soon they had the guy identified. They try to track him down. They call his parents.

“Oh, we haven’t seen him in months, but we know he stopped taking his medication!”

Our community relations manager puts the CD the crazed fan had dropped off in her PC upstairs. On it is some sort of multimedia presentation. It looked like it was addressed to Pete, and each animated frame of his slide show had some message. They might have been ravings, they might have been references to Townshend’s lyrics. Honestly, I’m not much of a Who fan, could be either. Stuff like “If you look through your Mirror Door, you know what you must do.”

Two hours before the concert starts, and every police officer we had ever hired for off-duty security is hanging out in the store, whether they were scheduled to be there or not. This is Christmas for cops. The crazed fan walks in the store. It’s crowded, but the police spot him right away. They surround him and bustle him into a cop car. I hear he’s held for a mental health examination for 24 hours. Sometimes the best climax is an anti-climax. The show eventually begins. Rachel Fuller comes out with her synthesizer and puts on a few numbers, her boyfriend backs her up on vocals for a few of those songs. It’s nice enough music, I guess. I never see the crazed fan again.

  • I helped train a pretty girl who started working there part-time. At one point she dropped the word “shiny” in conversation, as slang for something cool, as in “That’s shiny.” So we started talking about Firefly. We found we both liked Neil Gaiman books. Eventually I asked her out, and she didn’t shoot me down. Eventually, but not as soon as you would think, gossip spread that she and I were dating. And we continued to date. Years later, while I had moved on to another job, and while she had graduated from college and had a good Monday-Friday job, she still worked at the bookstore on weekends for extra cash and the employee discount. But eventually she tired of it and gave her two week notice. On her last day, which happened to be New Year’s Eve, I came by to pick her up from work. After she punched out, I walked her over between some bookshelves. She’s kind of a private person. I told her that this is the end of one chapter of our lives and I hoped it would be the start of another. That’s when I pulled out the ring, got down on one knee, and asked her to marry me. Reader, she did!
18

You remember those photo kiosks that you could drop your film off and come back a week later and pick up your printed pictures? I worked in one for the summer of 1980. It’s such a cramped space, drawers for holding pictures and a single chair with a cash register. Talk about Boring with a capital B. Outside of sorting through the incoming pictures and putting them in the drawer with the letter(s) for their last name, you’d maybe get 10-15 people a day driving through. I honestly don’t know how the camera company that was in the nearby mall made any money with this at all.

The building dimensions was probably 6x12, with a moderately pitched roof, with beams extending beyond the edge of the roof and with outside decorating making it look like a Bavarian chateau.

This is where I really picked up steam reading science fiction and fantasy as there literally wasn’t anything else to do for the 8-hour shift I was in there. Well, there was ONE thing but it got old quick - and that was going through all the pictures and looking at what people were taking pictures of. Outside of the out-of-focus / vacation / birthday / celebration pictures, there wasn’t a lot. I remember finding maybe a handful of private porn pictures, but overall they were pretty boring including being so low resolution.

One day, I was kicked back in the chair, reading a book and the entire building just went WHAM. It was like being inside a car wreck, but in my case, the car was stationary and bolted to the concrete. Items were knocked from shelf, drawers partially opened and I swear my teeth rattled. Regaining my composure, I got out of my chair and went to the little 2x2 window on the side and looked out - just in time to see a lady with a mortified look on her face driving a truck with a camper away. The camper had a gnarly 6-8" gash about 2/3 the way down the top corner of the camper, with a mixture of aluminum siding and insulation trailing the camper not unlike a huge snake who had grabbed onto something only to lose its grip and trying to decide whether to let go or hang on.

I didn’t get the license plate, but fortunately the building really didn’t sustain any damage that I could see. I called my boss over the camera store and she came by to look at it and confirmed there really wasn’t much damage to the little building.

I left the job at the end of the summer never to return. What a boring ass job!

19

Aside from a month spent at an Ernst (a hardware chain that also sold general goods like clothes and groceries - sort of like a WalMart/Home Depot hybrid) just out of high school, my retail experience is thankfully pretty limited and without a lot of drama.

My only other retail gig was several years later, at a mom & pop owned record store in Carson City. Did that for about 2 months while between jobs. They also rented videos there (the glorious days of VHS), and like a lot of mom&pop video stores, they also rented pornos, but unlike those other stores, they didn’t have them in a secluded or curtained off area. They had their own shelf, but it was on the main floor, and you’d often find them at the end of the day, mixed in with the regular movies. The deal was, you’d bring the retail box from the shelf, and the employee would take it and then retrieve the tape from behind the counter in it’s rental box.

One day, a woman with three young children (oldest was a boy, about 6 or 7) comes in and picks up a couple videos for the kids. “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” and “Look Who’s Talking” as I recall. Then, junior swoops in with a last second addition of “Felanalingus” to the family screening, plopping it on the counter next to the others with a big beaming smile on his face. Mom was not even expecting it. She picked up the box, kinda confused, then turned it around and saw all the graphic images on the back, and her face went white, like she just witnessed her own mother getting decapitated. Then, she went ballistic and started howling at me, like it was my idea to have those movies out there. But man, the combination of a movie called Felanalingus, that kid’s mile-wide grin, and his mom’s comical look of terror before she lost it was just too much, and I started cracking up hard. That just made her more irate and yell harder, but I was already too far gone. Fortunately, the owner came down and restored order before it got ugly. That’s really my only memorable moment from that place.

Nowadays, I work in a retail division, but not retail. I just fix/replace the equipment. Our stores are all in the retail areas of casinos - mostly as kiosks, and open all 365 days of the year, so when there’s a lengthy repair or upgrade to be done, I have to go in late at night, when it’s closed. We had a kiosk at the Excalibur that would lower everything into the main counter at night, and would be secured with a wooden top, so it looked like a bare countertop when the store was closed. I came in one night at about 3AM, and found a big pile of hair on the wooden cover. Like someone took sheep shears to their head, and then just neatly arranged it into a big pile. I’ve come in to find poop and pee on the floor, and drunks passed out inside the kiosks of our stores before, but a pile of hair was a new one.

20

I worked at drug store as my first real job when I was 16. One time a younger guy came in to buy condoms.

He came to me instead of the female cashier beside me, trying to keep a low profile. Problem though when I scanned the box, and the machine returned the off-key tone “item not recognized”. Beep. I tried again. Beep. I tried entering the code, and now there was someone in line behind him. Beep. Female cashier comes over and takes the condoms, tries to scan them. Beep. Now there were a few people in line looking over his shoulder.

“How much are they?” I ask shyly, because if an item isn’t recognized we can enter the amount manually. I probably would have taken his word for it at this point.

“Uh, I think they’re, uh…” obviously he didn’t know. We’re not allowed to leave when there are people in line so we call for a price check. Three minutes later the second female cashier comes over and says “what are they?”. First female cashier says in a quiet voice but fully audible “Trojan extra pleasure lubricated”. Cashier 2 goes off for two painfully long minutes and then comes back. “Uh sir, where did you find those on the shelf?”.

She goes off again for another two painfully long minutes, finally comes back. “Just put it as 8.99 under grocery”. My response was “uh, shouldn’t it be 8.99 under RX?”. “No, uh, actually I don’t know how to file it. Hold on.” She comes back so there are now myself, two female cashiers facing the customer and a line-up behind him. She calls the manager on the phone. (I swear to god this all happened). “Condoms, yeah. Should they be under RX?” “Grocery?” Ok.

“Put them as 8.99 under grocery”.

Poor guy actually kept it together the whole time too.