My wife works at Target and usually the managers take turns with the gross cleanups. That can include vomit, piss and shit but sometimes creative stuff you wouldn’t think of like a customer put a package of meat back behind a shelf so no one knew it was there until it was rancid, started leaking and smelling like a dead body.

30 minutes is generous. I’ve watched the aisle get trashed in 5 minutes when I took my son shoe shopping for school last year. We were the only ones who put things back.

Sorry for wishing people didn’t make your job more difficult? Jesus the internet is never predictable.

Nah, I haven’t seen a mess like this in any of the stores in Belgium.

Almost like normal customers will clean up after themselves instead of behaving like a spoiled toddler and claiming people like you are getting paid to clean it anyway.

Because cutting costs is a very quick way of showing you are improving the bottom line in the short term and you get a bigger bonus that quarter. It is very easy to show savings from things like layoffs. Improving sales is harder to identify (was it the products? advertising? a mystery trend?) and take longer to appear on their charts. You’ll likely jump ship for the next job before the damage from your cuts shows up anyway.

I find that privately held companies tend to be better because the owner identifies personally with the business, it is “their baby”. They want to see it grow over their lifetime even if it means going slowly but steadily. With public companies the execs and board are brought in to increase profits regardless of the means and their timeframe is by the yearly quarter. There isn’t a strong mechanism to push them to focus on long term growth or stability. An exception are private tech startups that seem to focus on growing just enough to get the attention of a bigger company to give them a nice, fat offer and sell out and ditch the employees and customers.

Everything is a K-Mart these days.

I find the kind of behavior you’re describing as a sort of non-necessary survival mode behavior. They want to not just get the product they need, they want to get the best darn carton of strawberries in the entire batch. We’re not talking looking over a few cartons, we’re talking those people that will go through EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. That side of the spectrum. I feel like people who do this might be predisposed to hoarding tendencies or other obsessive disorders. Don’t get me wrong, fk those people, but I really want to believe there’s a reason behind the madness.

Anecdotal, but it seemed like 80% of the time it was the poorer folks doing this shit. Have a sister with 4 kids, super close to welfare level and her and her kids do this shit (mostly her kids do this and she just lets them). Shes just tired and inattentive all the time. What I’ve noticed gets her attention is when a store clerk or other customer calls them out and shames them.

So public shaming may help the problem, but in today’s world some of these people may turn rabid Mama bear on you. Some stores make you count items on hangers going in and then going out. That actually might work. But I’d rather see societal behavior change instead.

Side note: My sister has worked years of retail before so no idea how tf she does this.

Once you enter Primark, it’s MadMax rules

That is true, UK super- and hypermarkets were like this when I went to some of them. The attitude of customers is just weird.

I still have ptsd from some primark shops in uk…

Scenes I saw are now how I picture the locust plague.

How can some people be so unaware of basic society rules?

I’ve never been into a Primark, but this looks very much like TK Maxx (which is what TJ Maxx is called here in the UK).

Same, the stores near me are never this bad

Right, the Targets where I live are pretty clean and maintained but other stores however, tend to look like the photo in OP. Like Forever 21 and Ross always look like a fucking mess.

Can confirm, did a mandatory highschool weeks work experience in kmart a few years back - was the only person who cared to clean up the shoes.

Nowadays the shoe section is clean af. However I dont necessarily think it’s due to the workers - more likely less customers shopping for shoes offline.

I don’t generally buy shoes from those stores anyway anymore, I have very small feet so the selection sucks, but also none of the shoes last very long. Id rather spend $100 on shoes that last rather then $25-35 on shoes that fall to pieces after a month or two of use.

But when I do shop for shoes in these stores, I make a point to put the rejects back where they are supposed to go. That one week burned into my brain how painful it is to put away a mountain of shoes that people just tossed aside. So I’ll do my part to not be apart of the problem, and to make it easier for our poor retail workers.

I’ve been to plenty of places with boxes on the shelves, and it’s always been fine.

I’ll pick clothes off the ground by racks and put things back on hangers while waiting for my wife to finish her shopping. lol

It’s still the stores responsibility to clean up the aisle after asshole customers like that.

That is still a stupid way of looking at that sentence.

Shops should stock whatever they want.

Just because shoes are suddenly all the rage doesn’t mean they should stock shoes at coffee shops.

Check, where ‘very large’ can even be 2+ in worst case scenarios.

True. But some cultures produce a bigger proportion of “awful” people.

I’m pretty sure “American” describes a mixing of a bunch of different races. Unfortunately not harmoniously enough.

“American” isn’t a race but the internet commenter love affair with shitting on the USA is kinda played out. We’re not perfect, sometimes we’re not even all that good but it takes a special kind of delusion to ignore our efforts to promote peace and stability over the past century or so.

An easy counterpoint would be things like forever wars in the Middle East, shady CIA bullshit pretty much anywhere they think they can get away with it and other agencies that probably know me more intimately than my proctologist. Generally, I’d agree that there’s a lack of effective oversight and some poor decision-making at play. There’s a lot of work to be done but our slow, drunken stumble is still moving toward a better future more often than not.

I like the post apocalyptic Kmarts that are almost barren but there’s like one parked car out front and most of the windows are boarded up but the store is some how still open.

Depends on if the Target is in the ghetto too like many Walmarts are near.

In Britain, if you take something off the shelf and then decide you don’t want it, you put it back rather than just dropping it on the floor.

Despite their being no punishment for being a dirty, lazy bastard. Nor a reward for being tidy and considerate for the people that come after you, it’s basic self governance that makes things nicer for everyone.

American: shits all over the toilet floor despite a toilet being right there “that’s disgusting, they need to hire more toilet cleaners!!” Probably leaves without washing their hands because there’s no designated staff for hand cleaning and heads off to McDonald’s to go buy more burgers.

Absolutely shameful attitude.

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I mean… blame both. just because there’s cleaners you shouldn’t mess the place.

A lot of retailers tbh - people don’t take time to clean up after themselves for whatever reason