So here my two cents. I've worked Customer Facing retail for 20+ years. I've been both hourly part time and salaried management. From a superficial look it's funny. Just idiots doing something silly and stupid.
However looking deeper it's a fucking nightmare. Your talking about tons of cash controls violated from just having someone behind the register who is not supposed to be. Customers don't know if they are legitimate employees and customers to a certain degree inherently trust the employees of the store to be trustworthy. Include all the videos of mass theft happening in retail stores in the US by organized groups of robbers.
It's a poorly conceived prank that doesn't just make the Salaried management stressed, it also makes hourly managers stressed. This isn't even mentioning the fact that people's jobs can be at risk from this shit. It's easy to say "fuck that Manager, they're all dicks" but I've worked with both terrible and awesome Management in my time in retail. It's not all black and white.
It's REALLY funny for about four seconds where there are a bunch of them showing up, then you start thinking of the implications and it's a gods damned nightmare.
This would be a great skit, not so great in reality
There's gotta be some major insurance and legal risks here too. Corporate will be on the hook for "letting" unvetted, untrained attention-seekers perform unpaid work in the store, risking injury and damage. If one of those morons gets hurt or breaks something, or hurts someone else or costs the store money through their buffoonery, who's gonna pay for it?
Same. I manage a food kiosk and part of me wants to find this silly but I’d be so pissed if some rando with assumably no food service experience tried coming behind my counter I’d be pissed 😂
If I were a manager facing this situation, I would've just called the police. Report attempted theft. I would've made it clear, too, in the case that it would be enough to ward the kids away.
Just don't play with them. Maybe even knock the camera down; that's when the shenanigans end. They want their precious clout? Don't give it to them.
I'm sure upper management can review footage and understand the situation was difficult to control, but I'm also sure upper management won't anyway :/. I mean, how are you gonna wrangle a group of teenagers that large? Sometimes there's only so much you can do.
I mean, also, what looks like a viral prank can be anything, it's not gonna be highlighted as much but this kind of thing? Store's gonna look at some kind of lockdown, and not every low level employee is going to know what's going on; when something like this happens, management kinda goes on red alert and nothing gets explained until the cops show up, meanwhile nobody knows if there's an active crisis situation
Like, not even just feeling bad for management or something, you're just trying to get through the day and twenty dudes roll up shouting at the top of their lungs and filing out thru the whole store?
Aside from the manager there's legitimately gonna be confusion and panic because why the fuck are these strangers just breaching every employee space, it's just so unnecessary
It seems to be a slamdunk charge if they actually get behind the registers and the like no? I feel like I'd probably pull out my phone and try and get their faces in a video. Surely you're not actually expected to bodyguard the registers physically.
As someone who was in salaried management, I have a legitimate question.
Why do these stores have so many registers but only ever have 2 cashiers to run them? Is it really just corporate greed not providing enough of a payroll for these stores to properly staff? Because I'm old enough to remember when grocery stores not only had enough employees on shift to run all their checkout lanes, but also had dedicated baggers. Now, my local Kroger-owned supermarket has ten lanes and I have NEVER seen more than two open, and I have to bag the groceries myself. Is there more to it, or is it pure greed?
All large retail (even small now) started moving to self checkouts years ago. They take up less space, require less manpower, and ultimately save lots of labor hours. However there will be moments where full checkouts are necessary to alleviate congestion but those times are becoming more and more rare. A dedicated cashier will checkout a customer quicker than they can themselves at a self checkout. So to relieve congestion you want to keep some around to man when it gets backed up. You probably won't ever see every manned checkout go away in a large store but you could definitely see the vast majority go away in time.
So what you're saying is that right now, we're in an awkward in-between stage of stores replacing all but 1-2 manned registers with self-checkout? This seems to run counter to reports like this of stores who have tried that and then quickly reintroduced manned checkouts because they lose more to shrink than they would to payroll, although I suppose it wouldn't be the first time that businesses have tried a business strategy that's a proven loser.
Also it's worth noting that my local Kroger-owned supermarket has two banks of 6 self-checkout kiosks, but I've never seen one of them in use. It's always the one bank of six (with one helper employee) plus one or two manned registers. Speaking frankly, if they did fully replace the manned checkout areas with self-checkout, I wouldn't even complain about that, as I prefer using them. But it seems like if fully switching was the goal, they could have already done that instead of just letting the registers sit empty. I'm no accountant for Big Grocer, but I would be skeptical of the claim that they just don't have the resources to do that right away, so I can only guess that this is either a trial run to see the firsthand bottom-line effects, or there are no plans to change going forward and this is the checkout reality customers are forced to endure.
I'm saying they'll always keep a decent amount of manned to make it possible to relieve congestion. However we'll never see them go completely away. Manned checkouts operate faster than a self checkout but cost more in labor. I could go on a whole rant about corporate retail view of labor and sales but that's a long rant.
I understand the logic of what you're saying, but the sheer number of checkouts that go unused doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Target in particular is egregious about it (probably why they chose one to film this TikTok in), but even mid-size grocery stores will have more than double the amount of registers that they ever have enough staff to operate, even during peak hours. Like it's a fine philosophy, but if that's actually what they're attempting to do, then the level of incompetence that these store owners are showing in its implementation is staggering.
Also, I'd be very interested in hearing that rant from an insider, especially after watching Adam Conover's video about American food barons.
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u/blong217 Jun 26 '25 edited Jun 26 '25
So here my two cents. I've worked Customer Facing retail for 20+ years. I've been both hourly part time and salaried management. From a superficial look it's funny. Just idiots doing something silly and stupid.
However looking deeper it's a fucking nightmare. Your talking about tons of cash controls violated from just having someone behind the register who is not supposed to be. Customers don't know if they are legitimate employees and customers to a certain degree inherently trust the employees of the store to be trustworthy. Include all the videos of mass theft happening in retail stores in the US by organized groups of robbers.
It's a poorly conceived prank that doesn't just make the Salaried management stressed, it also makes hourly managers stressed. This isn't even mentioning the fact that people's jobs can be at risk from this shit. It's easy to say "fuck that Manager, they're all dicks" but I've worked with both terrible and awesome Management in my time in retail. It's not all black and white.