The Incredible Hulk Goes Shopping

I work in a large home improvement store. The health crisis is at its peak in my state and lines are bonkers at our store — wrapped around the inside of the store to the back wall. As you may imagine, we have many crazies come in over this time, as well as just impatient and frustrated people, which is understandable.

There is a line at self-checkout and this guy is already huffing and puffing and causing a scene in line about having to use self-checkout and having to wait in line. He gets to the self-checkout and proceeds to reluctantly scan his items. As he gets ready to pay, the card reader declines his card due to a chip error — we still don’t know if it was the card or the reader, as our new readers do this a lot.

So, what is the natural reaction for the customer in this situation? Ask for help? Retry the card again?

No. The man straight-up sucker punches the screen, breaking the screen and damaging the LEDs in the screen, rendering the whole system useless as our registers are all on one computer.

My coworker calls over our store manager to notify her that this man has just damaged about $700 worth of stuff and caused a scene while doing it. The store manager shows up to speak with him, and what do you think she does? Call the police? Have Asset Protection put this man on a trespass notice and force him to pay for damages?

No. She gives him all his stuff for free and makes no effort to punish him for breaking our stuff. This makes our jobs more difficult as we have to wait well over a week for a new computer, and this is one of the only two self-checkout machines that take cash, so it slows our lines even more.

I’m so glad I’m out of retail and only have to deal with people yelling at me over the phone now!