In society at large, it is generally understood by all that there are basic manners and norms that determine what is and what is not acceptable behavior when interacting with other human beings. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, all of these rules and norms seem to suddenly fly out the window when shopping is involved. They say that the customer is always right—but I’d say these stories might prove to be evidence to the contrary. Here are 42 ridiculous stories about the craziest things customers have ever decided to do while shopping in stores.
1. Dirty Little Secret
I used to work in customer service at Walmart. A woman came in one time to return a bag of soil because "the bag was dirty." She was dead serious.
2. Blood On His Hands
My craziest moment in retail was definitely the time when I was moaned at by a customer for not being available at a very obviously closed checkout counter. I was very clearly and obviously on the phone to 911 for an ambulance at the time, since a customer had very clearly and obviously collapsed while shopping and was now very clearly and obviously bleeding to death in the middle of the store.
3. I Can’t See the Logic in This
Last night, a customer asked me if he could borrow a pair of reading glasses from our store, take them home for the night, and then bring them back tomorrow. He even promised to leave all the tags on. Unfortunately, I had to say no.
4. Life’s Two Guarantees: Stupidity and Taxes
This woman insisted that I was overcharging her for an item. It was supposed to be two for five dollars and I was charging her five and change. Neither I nor my manager could persuade her that taxes are a thing that exist.
5. You’re a Mean One, Mrs. Customer
A lady told me that I had personally ruined Christmas for her children, because the store I worked at was sold out of Xboxes on the day she came in. She then told me that I should have kept some in the back. Umm, for what exactly? The off chance that some crazy lady would swing by last minute and demand one? The best part, though, was that she wanted me to call another store and check if they had any in stock. She lost it when I told her that the next store was half an hour away and was closing in 10 minutes.
6. Not From Our Part of the Milky Way
I used to work in a grocery store when I was younger. One afternoon, I hear a customer say "Excuse me" so I look up for a moment from stocking the milk, which I'm standing in front of. "Could you tell me where your milk is?" she asks me in a fully serious tone. I almost didn't answer her, milk is basically the whole aisle and I literally had it in my hands. Had she never seen what milk looks like before in her entire life? I honestly can think of no other possible explanation for this. What the actual heck could that have been??
7. That’s the Best Excuse You Could Come Up With?
I remember working at a sporting goods store many years ago. I watched a middle-aged guy come in, grab a soft shell jacket from the rack, put it on, and walk out while the cashiers just kind of stood there stunned watching him. We didn't really expect him to just leave like that, so we were just frozen. The security tag was still on too, and the alarm didn't go off, so we were just like "...did he just steal that?"
When someone finally confronted him about it, he tried to claim that he had had it on when he came in. Yeah right...
8. Cat Got Your Tongue
I didn't work there, but I was behind this woman in line at my tiny town’s dollar store. She was buying a couple cans of milk supplement for kittens. However, she thought that it was actual cat milk, and was buying it to drink herself at some sort of fancy food party she was throwing for herself and a few friends. "Yeah, I done went to Kroger's and got me some fancy cheese and whatnot too!"
I had to leave the line because I was on the verge of bursting into laughter over the look on the cashier's face.
9. Can’t Blame Them For Trying
One of our scanning machines at checkout had broken at one point, so a customer says, “Since my item didn’t scan, I can take it for free, right?” Haha, yeah right! Nice try, though! Better luck next time!
10. The Town Fryer
I worked at a fast food place for a while, and we had this one regular customer who would ALWAYS find something to complain about. Her favorite issue to complain about was the fact that, no matter what, our fries were NEVER fresh enough for her liking. Whenever we saw her coming in, we'd drop a fresh batch of them into the fryer just so that we wouldn't have to hear her complain about them.
She'd order, and we'd give her a package of fries directly from the fryer. Somehow, she would still tell us that they weren't fresh. What in the world? My manager would then apologize, take the fries from her, walk out of view, and bring back the same exact container to her a few seconds later. The lady would then say "these are perfect!" and move on with her day.
11. Low Fat, High Salt Diet
As a grocery store clerk, I was once berated for over 10 minutes because of the fat content in a piece of ham we were selling. This woman was absolutely adamant that ham "never had fat in it when I was a kid!" She demanded to know when they started adding all the fat into it. I just work here, lady.
12. The Midas Touch
A customer at self-checkout spent five minutes trying to scan an item. She then called me over and rudely yelled at me about our lousy machine being broken. I walked over and pressed start. Voila, it was magically fixed!
13. The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship
A guy came into my store. I had never previously encountered him in my life. I served him at the checkout and all was well. No less than an hour after my shift, a notification pops up on my phone. This guy had found both my Instagram and my Snapchat and had added me. What's even more creepy is that the only thing he knew about me was my first name.
That was it. I had also only recently moved to the area, and knew nobody around there. That incident creeped me out for sure.
14. Cleanup On Aisle Six
I work in a liquor store. One time, I watched a man who was carrying six bottles of red wine simply drop all six of the bottles to the ground, shattering them, and then proceed to just walk out of the store as if nothing had ever happened. His khaki pants were visibly stained bright red. He looked like some kind of a business casual savage warlord.
My assumption is that it had been an accident, and that he just left because he was horribly embarrassed. A part of me, though, wants to believe that it was all an intentional piece of performance art, because it was the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.
15. Leaf Blower Versus Whistleblower
I had a crazy experience at a hardware store I used to work at. Some big dude parks his truck right by the entrance from the street, then walks in and shouts "WHERE ARE THE LEAF BLOWERS?!" I kindly tell him which aisle he can find them in. He proceeds to walk over, grab one, and then start walking out the front door.
I rushed over to him with a notepad in my hand and asked if I could see his receipt. He looks over at me and says something along the lines of "Nah, I paid up front! It's all good." So I kind of shrugged it off and let him go, but I wrote down a description of him as well as his car and license plate number. I called the higher-ups at my store and told them about what had happened.
Two days later, the lady I reported it to comes walking up to me in the store and says "they're arresting him right now. Like, right now." I head outside and watch it go down. Turns out that my stopping him to ask to see his receipt just so happened to cause the cameras to get a direct, clear shot of his face. As a result, companies will now be viewing the footage of the encounter as an example of how to properly deal with such situations.
16. From Bad to Worse
I once asked a customer in my store how her weekend went. She replied with:
"Well, I have to take care of my mother and my mother-in-law full time because they're both on hospice, and I can't work because I have spinal meningitis and the pain is too much to bear. This weekend, I had to drive my sister to three different hospitals to see specialists for her cerebral palsy, and then I had to visit my uncle who has eye cancer."
Now, here is where it's important to note that this woman was buying nothing but sixteen gallons of distilled water. She continued: "That's why I'm buying this water. I use it to make a special tea that cures cancer. I can see that you have freckles, so you're definitely going to get skin cancer someday. Let me write down the recipe for you. It really works! My uncle was supposed to die a year ago, but he’s still alive because I make him this tea all the time."
Yeah, I don’t mean to be rude, but a simple “My weekend was fine, how was yours?” was really all I was looking for…
17. Sticking Her Foot in Her Mouth
I work at Macy's in the women's shoe department. Our customer base mainly buys clearance items, and rarely spends more than $40. Every single day, I watch as customer after customer asks if they can use coupons to get whatever extra percentage off of the price or discount they think is possible. Now, many do this, but one customer absolutely took the cake over every other one.
She came up to me and asked me to bring out 18 different pairs of clearance shoes she was interested in buying. As I work off of commission and this was a pretty large potential sale, I basically ran around the stockroom like a madman trying to gather all of these shoes. I brought them all out neatly stacked in their boxes, and rang them up at the register for her.
The total came to $236. This is where things started to head south. She asked if she could use her 20% off coupon. Now, normally the answer to that would be heck yeah, no problem. But this particular day happened to be the day of a major sale—all clearance shoes were marked down 80% and were roughly $10-20 per pair. Because of this, coupons were prohibited for the day.
When I informed her of this, she SCREAMED at me until I called my manager over. She called me every name in the book, told me I was a complete idiot, said that I shouldn't be allowed to work there because I didn’t know what I was doing, everything you can imagine. My manager finally came over. When she explained to the lady that coupons, in fact, were not allowed for this particular sale, the woman bought all 18 pairs, for $236, but insisted that someone else ring the sale up so that I wouldn't make any commission on the transaction.
Little did she know the other salesperson rang it up using my ID number. I win, crazy lady!
18. Side by Side
I was cashiering in a grocery store. One time, this crazy customer walks up to the lane next to mine and starts secretly unloading items from her cart onto the previous customer’s side of the divider, as if she was hoping that the other customer would just pay for them all on her behalf without noticing. The other customer didn't see any of this going on, until she needed to pay and realized that her bill was way higher than she had expected.
19. Oil in a Day’s Work
I used to work at the service counter of the Automotive Care section at a local Walmart. I had only been working there for about two months at the time when this story occurred. A coworker had asked me to throw out some used oil that a customer had just dropped off. He told me that I could find it just outside the door of the repair shop.
So, I walked out the door and found two containers of motor oil sitting there in the spot he had described. However, they were still in the original packages, not the way you would expect some old jugs that someone just left there to be thrown out to look. Before I could move them, a customer came up to me and asked for a flat tire repair.
I went to help the customer first, leaving the oil cans where they were. Finally, after I finished with this other customer, I grabbed the two cans of oil and took them out to the shed to be dumped. Since the packages made them look like they might have been new, I double checked the seals on each one and saw that they were indeed both broken.
Now knowing that I had taken the right ones and not two new ones by mistake, I shrugged, dumped the oil, and tossed the containers in a trash bin. About 30 or 40 seconds after getting back to the front desk, we get a call. I answer the phone and a customer hurriedly asks if I had dumped any oil recently. After confirming that I had and that it had been his, the rest of conversation went as follows.
Me: "Yes, the oil you dropped off has been dumped. We normally dump oil immediately after it is dropped off." I neglected to mention how much longer than usual it took us this particular time. Him: "NOOOO! I brought those in by mistake and one of those two was new oil, I had just opened it to lube a seal. I always put my old oil back into the containers and I got these mixed up."
Me: "I'm sorry about that sir. Anything I can..." Him: "This is the second time I have bought new oil from you guys, only for YOU to dump it in the trash!" Me (slightly confused): "I apologize. Is there any..." Him (shouting as loud as he possibly could): "SCREW YOU!!!" Then, awkward silence for about a minute or so. Me: "Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"
Him: "Actually, yeah. I think the cap on the oil I bought when I was there is the wrong color. Can you check for me?" Me (slightly more confused): "You would like me to check the color of the cap on your old container?" Him: "Yes." I put him on hold and went out to the shed. I spent a few moments digging into the trash bin trying to find the right container.
Luckily, I remembered what brand it was so I was able to find it fairly quickly and return to the phone. Me: "The color of your container's cap that was dumped is silver." Him: "NO! I don’t care about that one! I want to know the color of the ones on your shelf!" Me (slightly even more confused): "Okay then, what kind of oil did you get?"
Him: "BRANDNAME, OIL NUMBERS." I go and check the cap, and it is gold. Me: "I apologize for the confusion, the caps on the shelf are gold for that oil." Him: "Are you sure? Are all the caps gold?" Me: "I believe so." Him: "I NEED YOU TO BE 100% SURE!!" Me: "Ok, I'll go check again." They were still gold. Me: "They are gold."
Him: "The cap isn't the right color, I think this oil was mislabeled!" Him: "My cap is silver! You guys sold me the wrong kind of oil! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU! YOU IDIOTS NEVER GET MY ORDERS RIGHT!!!" Just to be clear, we don't pick out the oil for the customer. We can look up the type, but the customer has to go find it on the shelf and bring it to a register themselves. There are no “orders” for us to be getting right or wrong in the first place. My friend later verified that this guy did not ask for help from anyone in the department to locate his preferred type of oil.
Him: "Screw Walmart, I hate you! You guys are always trying to trick customers into buying stuff they don’t want and I won't be doing any more business there from now on, I'll give my business to someone else instead! I am coming in right now to return this!" Me: "Okay. Sorry." He slams the phone down. About 30 minutes later, he arrives in the store.
As I always introduce myself by name on the phone, and he sounded livid as hell on the phone, I avoided the counter the entire time. Instead, I asked my boss to handle it—which thankfully, he was cool about doing. I could only hear part of the conversation, but essentially the guy was trying to imply that the factory had not given this oil the right label because the cap was the wrong color.
Possible, but not likely. My boss had no way to prove or disprove this, so he didn't say too much at that point. The customer was obviously waiting for him to offer compensation, because he then asked if we would accept him returning the oil for a refund. My boss looked at the oil, picked it up, and then immediately said no.
The customer got a bit upset that we wouldn't take his oil back, even though he had already half emptied it. After some investigation, my boss also found the following—you know how when you open a milk gallon and you twist the cap off, there is that little circle of plastic that usually tears off and stays on the gallon? That is called the safety seal or something like that.
Turns out the seal on his oil can was, in fact, gold after all. The cap was silver, but naturally had no safety seal. My boss calmly brought this up. All of a sudden, the customer immediately got very quiet and left the store. So yea, all of that absolute insanity turned out to be literally for nothing!
20. Animal Farm
This crazy lady who used to shop at my store on a regular basis once came in and told me that she had just adopted an 11-year-old dog with 15 puppies that would have definitely been put down if not for her intervention—because its previous owners didn’t care about its health and well being, whereas she was an “expert” in herbal medicine for animals. As much as I’m sure we all appreciate her concern for innocent animals, it was definitely one of the weirdest moments I’ve ever had on the job.
21. Busted!
I’m a former police officer, but I once witnessed something crazy happen involving a retail customer. I get a call to Lowe's one day for a guy trying to run out of the store with a shopping cart full of stolen power tools. I'm not too excited because they usually get away and Lowe's Loss Prevention is pretty useless and nonexistent.
They usually can't stop anybody, won't prosecute, and the corporation just writes off the loss. Anyway, this guy loads up like $2,500 worth of Dewalt tools and sprints out across the parking lot to his buddy waiting at the end in a vehicle. Loss Prevention pretty much just says, "Hey, stop!" and does nothing. Well, he happens to do this about the same time that a bunch of burly construction workers are walking into the store—including one guy with his family who happens to be a college football weight training coach.
From the look of him, I believed it. Anyway, the thief sprints around the construction workers and heads out across the parking lot. Football Coach, who probably runs competitively, sprints and snaps this guy in half like some red-shirt rookie quarterback meeting a veteran D-Back at spring training. The thief is hopped up on meth, so he tries to take a few pop-shots at Football Coach right as all the construction workers get there.
These guys proceed to give this loser the most thorough whooping he's ever gotten in his entire life. When I got there, he looked like he'd been rolling around in a cement mixer full of rocks. I arrive to a crowd of people standing around him hunched over on the ground. I asked "What the hell happened to him?" and what I heard back was: "He fell..."
About 20 people who had gathered at the scene said it to me in unison. We arrested the thief, took him to county jail, and that was that. Loss Prevention later told me what had really happened and we both thought it was pretty darn hilarious, as that guy had stolen about $10k worth of merchandise over the last several months. Remember kids, if you're gonna do something stupid, make sure you have a clear exit plan!
22. Wii Make the Rules in This Store
Back in 2010, I worked at Target in the electronics department when Wiis were all the rage. Right before Christmas time, we were having some trouble with a group of customers who would arrive early in the morning right when we were opening, buy our whole stock of Wii systems, and then sell them online for double what they paid in our store.
This obviously made it impossible for regular families to be able to come to Target and just buy a Wii, so we made a rule that each individual person could only buy two Wiis per day. Shortly after the implementation of this new rule, a man came into the store smiling as if he had just won the lottery, apparently assuming that he was the first person to have ever come up with this clever get rich quick scheme.
He said, "I want to buy all the Wiis you can give me." There was a long line of people behind him who looked outraged. I said "Sir, the limit per customer is two Wiis." The customer replied, "No, I got here first, so I’m going to buy what I asked for." I said, "Sir, I’m very sorry that you feel that way, but the store policy says that I am only allowed to sell you two."
He replied "Oh, you’re sorry? No, I think what you are is deaf, because I already told you what I want two times. Call your manager. NOW." Our manager came out and asked him to leave. He started to yell at us and said he was going to file a Better Business Bureau report. I wanted to dive over the counter and beat his greedy-you know-what; but, you know, it’s illegal and stuff.
23. Crying Over Spilt Milk
I used to work at a grocery store as a bagger. This guy said he wanted his milk in a bag. He had a lot of stuff to pack up, so when I got to the milk I wanted to double check what he said before doing it. So I asked a second time whether he wanted a bag.
He proceeded to yell at me so loudly that the next two lanes got quiet and they were all staring at what was going on. "Are you stupid? You have hearing problems? Where is your manager? They should fire you for being so stupid. I already said I wanted it in the bag." Jeez, I’m just trying to make people happy.
24. Story Time
I worked at a bookstore. We sold both new and used books. This lady kept insisting that we were trying to scam her by labeling used books as new. She methodically removed dozens of books from the shelves to argue one-by-one that they were actually used, not new. None of the books were used. We tried showing her that some were published literally three days ago—but she wasn't buying it.
I explained that the publisher chose to print the book on off-white pages with uneven page sizes, but she wasn't buying it. I said that the dust jacket just got dinged in shipment, which happens a lot. I offered her 10% off, but she wasn't buying it. She'd do this nine or ten times, over the course of a month. She would come in, pick out about twenty books, bring them all up to the counter, and argue that each and every one of them was used and that we were scamming people.
She'd involve other customers in the charade, get loud, and threaten to file complaints with the Better Business Bureau. Eventually, someone would have to give her a coupon or discount to get her to shut up so that she would leave and we could check out the rest of the customers in peace. This persisted for the better part of a month, and each time the ownership group declined to kick her out.
The problem was, she was still actually spending some money in the store. Even if she only paid 80% of what everyone else did, we still were making a profit. Then she made a new hire cry. The assistant manager was late coming back from lunch, and all discounts have to be approved by a manager. So this lady was holding up the line for ten minutes, calling the poor checkout girl all sorts of nasty names and questioning her intelligence.
I was never so happy to be able to kick someone out and tell them they're trespassing if they ever come back. This lady was a horrible person, and thought she was smarter and knew more about books than every single one of us.
25. Downscale
You'd be surprised how many women I’ve seen in my store who would rather slip a raw steak into their purses or pants than just pay whatever price they are being sold for.
And this is in the 'upscale' supermarket of the area, no less...
26. Shedding a Few Tears
This woman came in and bought a shed. I asked her what her loading bay number was and she said that she hadn't driven. I asked her if she needed me to get the number of whoever was driving her. She said her husband could carry it. I stared at her and said very slowly "Madam, it’s a building." She insisted that I was being ridiculous and demanded that we bring it out so that her middle-aged, slightly chubby husband could carry it out of the store, as they only lived "about a 10-minute walk away."
We brought it over, with extreme difficulty. When we arrived, she asked me "What's that thing?" I said, "That's your shed, madam." "There's no way Jeff is carrying THAT!!!" Oddly enough, she had a change of heart and decided to just pay the money to have it delivered.
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27. The Greatest Show on Earth
I used to work at Walmart, and one day some people came in saying that they wanted to purchase a new TV. Now, I already knew these people to be rather shady, as they used to come in several times a week to try to “return” cans of food for cash that were not actually purchased at our store. My guess is that the true source of the cans was likely the local food pantry.
Anyway, they asked to borrow one of the big flatbed carts from the service desk where I worked. I asked if they would like me to page an employee to come over to our department to help, and they hastily said no and booked it out of the service desk area. A few minutes go by and I see them rushing out the door with an unpaid for TV, cart and all.
No spider wrap, no alarm, no door greeter to check receipts. No one except for me was even aware that this had happened. When I told my supervisor about it, she just shook her head and said that there was nothing we could do. About a week later, who do you suppose shows up? The same people with their new TV, of course, saying that it didn't work properly and that they wanted to return it. They just happened to have "lost the receipt"...
28. Spilling the Beans
While working in a grocery store, I walked past a family picking out ice cream. They looked up and just casually told me that they might have left a leaky case of soda on the floor several aisles back. Turns out they had dropped it and just left without even bothering to see if it was leaking or to find anyone who could take care of the problem. There was soda everywhere thanks to them, yet they had no problem just going on with their shopping.
29. Sam Doesn’t Work Here Anymore
This story took place before the time of HD and flatscreen TVs, but long since cable TVs had been around. A lady came into the Walmart I was working at with a huge floor model console TV—the kind that had no remote—and wanted to return it and get her money back. She started yelling at me when I told her that I wasn't going to be accepting the return, as she had no receipt and the TV was obviously more than 15 years old.
As is common with these types of people, her response was to demand that I let her speak to a manager. So I paged a manager on the intercom who then came over and basically told the customer the same exact thing that I just had. The customer then started screaming at us and demanding to speak with "Sam." We both looked at each other blankly for a few moments, before one of us finally said: “Sam who?”
"Sam Walton, your boss!" she screamed impatiently. For those who may not know, she was referring to the name of the original founder of Walmart—who passed away back in 1992. At this point, my manager had had just about enough of this lady's lunacy. She told her, "Well ma'am, we have a wide selection of top-notch shovels in our Lawn & Garden department. Why don’t you go purchase one so you can go dig him up!" The woman left abruptly and didn’t bother us any further.
30. Caught in the Act
A guy walked into the tractor supply store where I used to work and stole a bunch of bolt cutters off of the shelf. He then walked to the side door and cut the lock where two of his buddies had been placing items near the door. They piled everything into this tiny car and just drove off. They were caught later that day for trying to steal from another store in the same plaza.
31. Showing Off for No One
My story is more gross than crazy, I guess. This weird jogger mom came into my store one day. You know the type—roughly in her late 40s or early 50s, a little too tanned, super fit, and wants everybody around her to know it. Anyway, she starts trying on different clothes in the fitting room, and she keeps on walking back out to get other sizes without even bothering to put her clothes back on.
She wasn’t naked, but she was basically strutting around publicly across the store floor in only her pants and a bra, or one one occasion, only a shirt and panties—which were fairly modest ones, thankfully. I did try to intercept her many times during this process to tell her "Hey, you know I can get that for you” or “Please stop walking around the store without pants on!"
Nevertheless, she kept brushing me aside each time with a "Nah, I got this!" This happened over and over again until she finally found what she was looking for, paid for it, and left the store. Later that day, when I was cleaning out the clothes she had left behind, I reached down into the bottom of the bin and fished out a pair of panties.
I was about to hang them up on the shelf when I realized that they were: A) Not a pair that we sold, and B) Clearly used. Yep, this woman had left her used panties behind in our dressing room and I inadvertently touched them with my bare hands. Needless to say, I have been scarred for life.
32. Sounds Like Someone is a Little Chicken!
A woman once came into my grocery store and bought ten trays of chicken. She then claimed that she couldn't touch any meat because she was severely allergic to it and it would make her skin rot.
33. The See No Food Diet
I work in a butcher shop. Today, a lady came in looking for lean turkey mince, as she was on a new diet. She said that her daughter had made up her diet plan and is weighing her every day to keep tabs on it. I asked her how she is finding it so far, and she said "It's really tough. This is going to be the first thing I'll have eaten in two days." I wanted to tell her to stop listening to her daughter.
34. Not All Changes Come Easy
I used to work in an Old Navy store for quite a few years back in the day. We weren't particularly known for our thorough loss prevention and security capabilities, so some customers had gotten quite comfortable with openly stealing things in front of employees whenever they wanted to. Eventually, loss prevention got turned over to new management and was subsequently kicked into overdrive.
They had squads of people who would team up in our stores to attempt to catch a few people in the act of shoplifting and bust them publicly. The purpose of this was so that the word would spread that there was a new sheriff in town and, as a result, we'd hopefully see a few less shoplifters from then on. They were running this operation at a store in a low-income area, when suddenly a mild-mannered lady in her mid-50s came in and started shoving random things into her purse with little regard for her surroundings.
There were literally a bunch of shoes and tops visibly hanging halfway out of her purse as she walked around the store. When she tried to leave, loss prevention stopped her at the door and informed her that they had notified the police and that she needed to remain there until they arrived. She immediately said "But I have to go to the bathroom!" and as they tried to tell her that this was not an option, she started to scream "HERE I GO!" and pooped in her pants.
With no other option at this point, they escorted her to the nearest bathroom. After all, it was a single room without any windows, so she had no chance of escaping from it if they let her go in and finish her business in peace. They figured that this would be an opportunity for her to clean herself up, and felt that it would also probably be best for the police’s sake if they could avoid having to spend time soaking their squad car in bleach after taking her in it.
Shortly after the police arrived on scene, they realized that she had been in the room for a while and was not responding to questions. She also would not unlock the door despite multiple requests from the officers. Finally, management opened the door with a key and found the woman covered in her own feces, which she had also rubbed all over the walls, ceiling, and floor. Thankfully, I did not have to clean up the mess for once! And I definitely don’t envy whoever did have to. People are honestly nuts. I've got a million stories, but few can beat this one.
35. Never Give Up
There is no limit to how crazy some people will get when it comes to shopping. I used to work in a retail clothing store. A few customers caught on to the fact that our store would throw unsold items away in the dumpster every once in a while when it became clear that they were no longer sellable. So, these people started coming into the store, picking out items that they liked, pooping on them in the dressing rooms, and leaving them behind to be discovered and subsequently discarded as unsellable by our staff.
Naturally, they would then show up after hours a day or two later and recover their desired items from the dumpster outside, free of charge. These people would take and poop on anything from brand new shoes, to clothes, to lingerie—anything you can imagine! After a while, it became an almost daily occurrence at our store and management eventually caught on.
From then on, whenever someone attempted to do this, management would pour bleach all over the unwanted clothing items before dumping them in the trash. Amazingly, even this did not deter them from continuing their outrageous quest to get clothes for free. One of my coworkers told me that on more than one occasion, she would see people come into the store wearing a shirt that she recognized from our shelves, but with huge bleach stains now across it.
As far as I’m aware, for all the times that these individuals have done this with our clothing, they have never actually purchased a single item from our store.
36. Recipe for Disaster
When I worked at Five Guys, someone once asked me if our French fries were made from real potatoes, despite the many signs clearly saying so and the 50-pound bags of potatoes right in front of their face.
37. No Interest in Smalltalk
I had a customer come into my store and tell me that I was only happy and smiling because I wasn't old enough yet to realize that life is nothing but pain, suffering, and waiting to die. That definitely brightened up my day!
38. When Nature Calls
I used to work in an H&M store located on 5th Avenue in New York City, so, as you can imagine, we would get jerks from all over the world. One day, I hear a frantic call over our staff radio demanding that the janitor come over to the ladies’ fitting room right away. It turns out that some woman decided to take a poop right there in the fitting room, and then used some of our shirts as toilet paper. As if that isn’t crazy enough already, the real “are you serious?” moment for me was when we realized that she had just continued casually shopping around the store after doing this.
39. Out to Lunch
I worked at McDonald's back when I was about 16 or 17 years old. During my very first day on the job, I was in the grill area training during the lunch rush when this guy comes in through the drive thru and orders 100 burgers. He specifically wanted 50 plain, and 50 with cheese. My immediate reaction was “what the hell, man?”
I was later told that this guy ran a lunch truck in the area, and that he would often come by and make these kinds of huge orders so that he could resell our products for a profit. At the time, we had a 49 cent burger day and 59 cent cheeseburger day. He would take advantage of our deals in bulk, then just change the wrapping on the burgers to his own and sell them for like 2 to 3 bucks a piece to his customers. I’m still undecided as to whether this guy was brilliant or crazy. Could it be a bit of both, perhaps?
40. Write This One Down
When making a purchase at my store, I handed a woman a pen to write her check with. She turned it over five times and pressed on the cap like it was a click pen. She then unscrewed the body so that the ink well almost fell off. She finally handed it back to me, asking how it worked. I silently pulled off the cap and handed it back. She said, "Well huh, that's different!"
41. Number One On My List
I work in an electronics store and I don’t even have to think twice about which guy was my least favorite customer of all time. One guy comes in, hands me a phone, and says it "just stopped working" out of the blue. I take out the battery, and pee starts just pouring out of the phone. He then admits that he dropped it in a urinal recently while drunk. If this jerk had been honest about the situation, I could have put on gloves before handling his phone. I had him tossed from the store immediately.
42. Spamming His Inbox
I work overnight stock at Walmart. One night, I'm stocking the Spam section and this big guy walks up to me. By big, I really mean big! I'm talking 300 to 400 pounds big. I continued minding my own business and putting things on the shelves when he started to speak. "Excuse me, sir. I am so, so sorry that you have to see this," he said.
And then he just...pauses. Confused and concerned on equal levels, I stand up and turn around to look at him, wondering what, exactly, he plans on doing. After staring at me for a good 20 seconds or so, he reaches over and grabs a ton of Spam. More containers of Spam than I ever thought anybody should ever need in their lifetime, let alone in one shopping trip.
With his cart fully loaded with Spam, he turns around and walks away, leaving a huge empty spot on the shelves that I had been filling up consistently for the last several minutes. I manage to get out a quick, "Have a nice day" before he escaped around the corner. It was certainly an experience...
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