The supermarket is supposed to be a place where you can just pop in to grab the essentials, but certain elements can make that quick trip into a nightmare, especially for the workers. These poor folks got dealt a rough hand when they clocked in at work that day, and the customers were usually to blame!
Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

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“While working at Walmart, I watched a woman grab a jar of organic peanut butter, smash the glass bottle on the ground, and use the shards to cut her face. After slicing the crap out of her face, she ran up to me as I stood there, stunned, and asked to see a manager. I called somebody over and the manager rushed her into the office while asking me to call 911.
Apparently, she was an addict and jonesing hard. She figured the best thing to do was get hurt at Walmart so they would give her ‘a million dollars for pain and suffering.’ Shockingly enough, Walmart didn’t pay out to the junkie that cut up her own face.”
The Egg Man Cometh

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“Shopping at Trader Joe’s right before closing. There was almost nobody in the store, so I was zipping around in a hurry. I got to the egg rack and there was a tall man standing there, blocking the whole thing, while holding an open egg box and just staring at it. Not checking for broken eggs like I do, but just staring at the box. So I tried to work my way around him, but he was muttering to himself, and I decided it would be better to give him some space and get eggs another time. Then, as I was going down the next aisle, I heard him start to cluck and crow, soft at first, but then it got much louder. Then BAM, I saw an egg hurled across the store and it splatted on the wall above the meat rack. I was thinking it was time to bail at this point. Then I heard a call for manager on the intercom and bells dinging at the register, so I pulled back and watched the drama.
Manager #1 came up in a colorful Hawaiian shirt and instructed the nutbag to drop the eggs and please leave. The man jumped back and started yelling profanity and clucking. Threw more eggs at the wall and went for another carton of eggs.
Manager#2 (or maybe a checker) tried to confront him, and nervously said, ‘We called the cops, it’s time to go.’ So I got to the front checkout with a shopping cart half full and decide it wasn’t worth it and left.”
What He Found In The Bathroom Left Him Speechless

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“I was a cashier at Kroger for a bit. The employee restroom was in the back of the store, so us front end people would always use the public bathroom at the front of the store. I had to pee one day and ran in the men’s room. There was only one stall, which was massive since it was a handicap stall. Other than the stall, there was a urinal. I was at the urinal doing my business when I heard the door open behind me and heard someone literally run into the handicap stall and almost immediately starts pooping. Just the worst, most awful sounds you could imagine coming out of that region of the human body, along with grunts and groans from the person. And the smell. The smell was atrocious. As I tried to finish peeing, I looked down just to get a glimpse of this person’s shoes so that I can see who this monster is when they come out of the bathroom, but I realized I couldn’t see any feet. In fact, I didn’t see anyone at all. I could see the bottom of the toilet and the floor, but no human being. I thought, ‘What the heck?” and moved away from the urinal and over to the sink, which was in front of the door to the handicap stall….and the door was wide open because the person didn’t close it. Thanks to the wide open door, I saw that the person was crouched in the corner of the stall, opposite of the toilet, and just pooping directly on the bathroom floor. The guy realized I was looking at him, made eye contact with me and with a completely serious and blank face said, ‘Oh…sorry,’ and pulled his pants up, moved right past me, and out the door. He didn’t wipe or anything. He just stood up and left, leaving a Triceratops-sized pile of crap on the bathroom floor. I was so dumbfounded by all of this that I didn’t even say anything to anyone. I just left the bathroom and went back to my check lane.”
Getting Creeped On Is Part Of The Job

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“Some guy came up to my till and didn’t even have anything to buy. My store was very busy, so I didn’t even notice he didn’t have anything until later. He asked me if I wanted to be friends, as if he was ten years old. (I’m thinking he was about 30 though.)
Being in my cheerful, upbeat cashier mood, I said sure. He wouldn’t leave me alone, badgering me for my phone number. He left with his parents at one point, but called the my store after asking for me, which was super weird. He apparently made a lot of sexual assault threats, so I got let off work early and wasn’t allowed to leave the store until my mom picked me up.”
An Unfriendly Reminder Of Mortality

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“I was at my local store a few weeks ago. Walked in and looked to my left and saw an old woman lying on the floor. A nurse or doctor (they were wearing scrubs) was checking her pulse and trying to get her to stay with them; I must’ve just walked in after she collapsed on the ground. A few minutes later, an ambulance showed up and tore open her shirt and started CPR. But to no prevail, with a grim look on his face, the EMT called it as they got a stretcher and whisked the body away with no sirens going. That was the first time I’ve even seen someone die in front of me.”
The Tiny Menace Of The Grocery Store

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“I worked as a courtesy clerk (bagging and mop-up) in high school. I saw many things (e.g. your typical blood-and-crap-smeared bathroom stall or crapped in pile of clothes), but the most memorable was this woman and her kid that would come in regularly. The kid was probably 6 or 7 and was a real terror. I got the feeling the mom had a lot of problems and the child’s behavior was the least of them. She let him run free and pretty much use the store as his playground. He would knock things down. He broke wine bottles all the time. He would open food and leave the wrappers. He would rummage through the dry goods as if he was a wild raccoon. I would’ve preferred he WAS a raccoon. In the worst instance, he was tearing through the bulk candy, maxing out his cheeks chipmunk style and dropping candy everywhere, when he decided to just take a full piss in his pants, mid-aisle. I came around the corner right at the conclusion of the pissing. He saw me, did like a Woody the Woodpecker type laugh, and booked it, leaving a trail of piss footprints. The mom never said anything about the messes, and we never said anything to her. She would buy what she came for and drag the kid out. Then everybody would look at me with the raised eyebrows look that wordlessly says ‘Sucks to be you right now.’ It was one of those character-building jobs.”
What Do You Do When You Can’t Fight Back?

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“I worked at a Food Lion for a short amount of time. I wasn’t a cashier, I stocked, dragged in carts, and bagged groceries.
The only eventful thing I can recall happening is when I was physically assaulted by an older mentally handicapped fellow. This guy was in his 50s, and attended to by his mother. She was probably in her 60s or 70s, I assume. I was attempting to bag their groceries and he just started wailing on me. His arms windmilling around in circles, pummeling me about the head and shoulders. My glasses were knocked off and sent flying, my shoulders bruised. He was much stronger than he looked. At this point all eyes in the store were on us, and the store was by no means empty.
I put the groceries down so my hands would be free to block, and he stopped. His mother was unphased. Her son had just battered someone, and all she could muster was, ‘Sorry, he thought you were stealing our food.’ I picked up my cracked glasses and went to another register to bag someone else’s groceries. My manager watched the whole thing happen and never said a word to me.
I left that job not too long after that event happened.”
The Worst Shoplifter In The World

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“I worked at a very busy downtown grocery store while I was between jobs. It was around May and, thanks to global warming, it was already super warm out for that time of year. It was a Friday and I was working the closing shift.
I got a call from my till, and I answered only to have my shift lead tell me: ‘We’ve been tailing a woman around the store who’s stealing some products. Just ring up whatever she’s bringing up. Security will get her before she walks out. Minimize your interaction as much as possible.’
She was not subtle. It was probably about 60 degrees outside, but this woman was in full winter gear. You know that episode of the Simpsons where Homer and Marge go to the candy expo and Marge steals a ton of candy and stores it in a winter coat? That was this woman. She literally had a ham pushing out of the front of her coat, along with God knows what else. Her coat was ready to burst. She herself was not in good shape, either – she reeked of booze, her eyes were twitchy, and she could barely keep herself upright. Like, walking in a daze. Or the weight of her coat.
She put a single chocolate bar on the counter. Whatever. I don’t give a crap. It’s 10:45 and I want to go home.
As I was putting through this chocolate bar, she suddenly wavered. I paused, told her her total was $2.45, she paid, I told her to have a nice night, and she suddenly passed right out. Smacked her head on the till, fell right to the floor. I just kinda stood there and leaned over. She was still breathing, but a bunch of things exploded out of her coat.
Security drags her off and the others started cleaning up. I was told to close my till and then I went home.”
Code Brown In Aisle Five

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“A very obese woman in a motorized cart crapped her pants. She stopped about 12 feet from where I was working, lifted her left leg and did a little shake as a pile of crap slid down her pant leg right onto the floor. I stood there in disbelief as she just motored on like nothing happened. Not 10 seconds later, another customer ran their cart through it and it left little crap-streaks across the floor from every revolution the wheel made dotted lines like on a roadway.”
She Was The Customer No One Wanted, But Everyone Had To Deal With

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“A little back story: I worked for a big box retailer. We were in a complex with a grocery store. We had a ‘regular,’ there was very clearly something wrong with her. She would come in about three times a week and buy a coffee maker and go home and try and make a cup of coffee. Then she would bring it back hours later hot, wet and full of coffee grounds.
Now to the Supermarket: One day, I was shopping and saw our regular at the grocery store. She had a shopping cart FULL of bags of frozen peas. I honestly think she had every bag of frozen peas in the store. I was curious, so I followed at a distance for a little bit. Eventually, she dumped the cart in a different area of the store and left. Within a minute, a worker grabbed the cart and started putting the peas back. He had the same resigned look on his face that we got when she brought back a coffee maker. I can only assume she visited them as often as us.”
He Thought He Finally Caught The Old Broad Red-Handed

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“Worked in a small, local mini market. There was an assistant manager there that none of us liked. He was incompetent, but really smarmy because his dad owned the company. One day, a known shoplifter came in (a woman in her 60’s), so he tracked her on the CCTV and saw her stash a bottle of expensive shampoo up her skirt. Delighted that he was going to catch her in the act and be a hero, he immediately went to confront her. Before he got to her, she had obviously felt something was up and put the shampoo back. When he confronted her and said he knew she was hiding something, she whipped off her dress in one quick motion and stood there stark naked and challenged him to find the shampoo on her person. He looked simultaneously devastated and disgusted and told us afterward that he could hear us all laughing in the security office from the shop floor!”
It Wasn’t Even The First Time She’d Brought The Jar

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“A customer was walking around the store carrying a jar full of her poop and showing it to people. I kid you not. It was a health food store, I was sitting in the cafe area filling out an application to work there, when she just walks up to me…middle-aged, musty, frumpy, smelly, pushing a cart around slowly…and thrust the pickle jar in my face, saying, ‘Look what came out in my colon cleanse!’ The poop was just…floating in there, loosely formed, yellowish, disgusting. It floated in what appeared to be urine. I tried to remain calm and civil because I was applying to work there. Didn’t want to cause a scene, and the customer is always right and stuff. I told her that’s not something I wanted to look at, but thanks, and glad her cleanse worked out. That’s when she handed me a business card and said to call her, she did colon cleansing for a living. When she shuffled off, poop jar in hand, I took my application to the manager, and told him, oh by the way, you have a lady in the store showing her poop to people. As I said that, she could be seen over in the produce department, showing her jar to a new unsuspecting victim. The manager laughed and said, ‘Her again?! I told her not to bring that jar in here again…’ She was escorted out of the store, I was hired that day, so there’s that.”
It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Gets Hurt

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“Lady with two kids (maybe 4 and 7) comes into the store with the grandma. The 4-year-old is sitting in the empty cart and the 7-year-old is running up and down the aisles, pushing her. Neither adult gives two craps at this point. The cart flips over with the 4-year-old inside and the mom drops the glass gallon jar of BBQ sauce she was holding, screams, and runs to the cart. She picks up the 4-year-old, cradles her, starts wailing and crying, just rocking her on the floor back and forth, all while sitting in the BBQ sauce. The grandma starts letting the 7-year-old have it. He had his back to a 7+ft foot tall display of Ritz cracker I had built earlier that morning. Then the grandma calls him a nasty name and shoves him into the display. The whole thing comes down on top of him. They pick up the 4-year-old and just leave the store. I help uncover the 7-year-old and he runs out the store after the mom. Totally screwed up.”
How To Get Kicked Out Of Dollar General

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“My sister works at Dollar General. Here’s the worst she has ever seen:
This woman comes in every month with her EBT card and buys every food you can picture. She’s really fat and parks in the handicap spot. She rides one of those Walmart scooters or whatever into Dollar General and has her kids (they’re both about 8 or 9) run around the store, throwing stuff around and helping her reach the top shelf. One day, my sister couldn’t take it and told the lady to please leave. So the lady spends about 20 seconds trying to get out of the seat. Once she does, she takes the 3-foot journey to the counter, starts breathing heavily and screams, ‘Screw you!’
The kids start screaming, ‘You go mama,’ and the mom waddles back to the seat. Well, she gets stuck in between the automatic doors because the battery died or something, I don’t know, maybe it just broke? So she calls her husband and the lady refuses to get up, saying, ‘I’m a handicap! My knees are handicapped!’ She sits there in her broken scooter for about 45 minutes til the husband arrives and carried her (don’t know how he did that) to the car.”
They Thought The Day Couldn’t Get Worse, Then A Guy Died On The Toilet

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“First, a drunk lady crashed her car into a snowbank in the parking lot. Then, a lady fainted in our little cafe sitting area and was on the ground (I was first to respond on that one). And then, finally, the most screwed up one after all of that…this lady was searching the store for her husband. Couldn’t find him. She didn’t ask me, but people were talking about this lady who couldn’t find her husband. Well, at some point during this, we found out that a guy died in the bathroom while on the toilet. Heart attacks are actually pretty common on the toilet, and it happened and no one found him until he was dead.
We put it all together hours later and figured that the guy who died was likely this woman’s husband. She was searching for her husband for an hour or so I was told, and we had been talking about there being a dead guy in the bathroom while she was looking for him. No one had put it together until we started to get closer to closing.”
This Dad’s Priorities Were All Jacked Up

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“I had a guy whose kid (about 5) threw up in the shopping cart all along the aisle. The poor kid looked miserable, I handed the dad some paper towels to clean the kid’s face up, and he tried to start cleaning up the puddles on the store. I told him not to worry about it and just get the little guy home.
About 10 minutes later, as I’m working on cleaning the mess up with a co-worker, the guy is back, waves at me and says, ‘My son said he’s feeling much better, so I can finish my shopping?’ What did they need so urgently? A pile of junk food and a chocolate bar for the kid to eat. No medicine from the pharmacy. Guess who was sick again at the registers?”
How Paper Towel Prices Can Lead To Tears

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“This is from when I was working at a grocery store. I was running the self checkout when a woman claimed the package of paper towels she was buying was scanning at a higher price than was listed in the aisle. She asked if I would go check it. In this situation, I was supposed to get a supervisor to check on the price, as I wasn’t supposed to leave the self checkout area unattended. She wasn’t happy about this, she made a big deal of, ‘Why can’t you just go check it?’ enough that I left my post to check the aisle. The price she was looking to get was for a smaller package of towels and when I reported that to her, she gave me an even harder time and demanded she was right and I was wrong, while refusing to double check it herself. I started to visibly lose my patience and gave a little attitude back when the woman just breaks down crying, telling me how she had lost her mother the night earlier and she was just having a hard time right now. I felt so awkward and guilty.
I apologized. My grandma had died a month earlier, and I tried to relate to her by carefully choosing my words, saying, ‘I know what it’s like, I saw my mother go through it last month when she lost her mother.’
The woman responded with something like, ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s harder when it’s your mother.'”
“They Didn’t Go Back To That Store For Years”

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“When I was a baby, my parents took me shopping at our local grocery store. They had me sitting in the baby seat in the cart. It was the ’80s and I was wearing just a onesie and a diaper. My mom got to the checkout stand and started to unload the cart. She noticed a frothy yellow goo on some of the items. She looked at my dad, then the items, and then back at my dad. He immediately panicked, shook his head, simply said, ‘Nope,’ and walked out the door. She told the woman at the register that she’d forgotten something, and put the items back in the cart. She then proceeded to find an empty aisle and ditched the cart. They didn’t go back to that store for years.”
That’s Entirely Too Personal

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“When I was 16, I had a summer job leveling shelves at Aldi. While I was pulling plastic from under the sparkling water, a man dressed like a pirate walked in. Obviously he wasn’t ‘all there.’ He was in dirty, colorful clothing and wore an eyepatch. He walked up to me and said:
‘You have any kids?’
‘No sir, I’m 16,’ I answered, at this point still somewhat amused.
‘You gonna have some soon?’ he followed up.
‘No sir,’ I answered, now wishing he’d leave me alone.
‘Will you breastfeed them?’ he asked. ‘When you have kids you gotta breastfeed them. You modern girls use formula, but I gotta tell you, breast milk is better for the baby’.
Awkward teen me tried to process what this freak was saying, so I just stared at him for a second and said: ‘Uh no sir, I-I don’t even want any kids.’ And thank god, he left me alone after that.”
Dip Responsibly

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“LET ME JUST TELL YOU.
I used to work in a small town grocery store, in a very country town. So a lot of the guys dipped. Which is fine, whatever, better than smoking I guess, since it doesn’t affect others…
UNLESS these DARN CUSTOMERS are shopping when they feel the need to spit. Which I guess is a requirement of their habit, usually solved by a spit cup or a nearby trash can (which there were plenty of).
BUT NO. Some STINKING people APPARENTLY think it’s okay to spit in empty boxes that haven’t been picked up by unsuspecting workers yet. You know the short, half boxes that cans are sometimes displayed in? Watch out for those because those seem to be a favorite! I have had to clean CLUMPS OF TOBACCOEY SPIT FROM SHELF BACKS. PEOPLE ARE DISGUSTING.
I’m sorry, but once you stick your hand in someone else’s COLD, BLACK SPIT, it starts to get to you.”
That’s No Way For A Woman Her Age To Act!

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“I was working in the floral dept. A large, old woman in a motorized cart asked if I could honor her expired coupon. I told her I didn’t have a register in my department, and pointed out customer service at the front of the store. Also, we didn’t even have the product the coupon was for. She purposely backed into a display of potted plants, but couldn’t knock them over to make her point, so she made a sharp turn and pushed over a few plants that were on the floor. She looked at me triumphantly with the expectation that my day would be ruined. RUINED. But alas, I just shrugged my shoulders and continued with my corsage making. She rolled away dejected to go torture the people in customer service. I didn’t get paid enough to care and made sure to wait to clean it up to deny her the satisfaction of seeing me pick up her mess.”
The Chicken Bandit Strikes Again

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“I’m a cashier and while I was ringing someone out, I saw this guy walk up to my counter with a full roast chicken. I glanced at him and continued checking out the person in front of me. When I looked back, he was gone. My manager came sprinting up the aisle, picked up the chicken, shook the container angrily and yelled, ‘I KNEW IT, HE DID IT AGAIN.’
I pulled the container over and saw that the guy had just taken a single bite out of the top of the chicken and left it. I have no idea how many times he’s done it, but apparently enough for my manager to recognize him.”