Boxing day used to be about collecting money and goods for the poor (in an alms box – hence the name) but now it’s about collecting as many Argos coffee makers as possible – for yourself, of course. This makes it hell for anyone lucky enough to be a shop assistant working on the day.
Indeed, working retail any time after Christmas is hell. Because that’s when the January sales begin. With Christmas spirit but a distant memory, the masses descend onto your store and tear it apart.
WHY AREN’T YOU PEOPLE ASLEEP?
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Why aren’t I asleep?
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There is no such thing as a soul
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I wonder if anyone would notice if I took a nap in the stockroom
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No dress is worth an attempted murder charge
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I know that item isn’t in stock, but if I go ‘look’ in the back I can get away from you horrible creatures
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Didn’t you people get enough from Santa?
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Was that customer joking when she said she was buying Christmas gifts for next year? PLEASE say she was
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My family are eating Christmas leftovers
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Maybe I should tell these people about internet shopping
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You can’t return your Christmas present IN FRONT of your mum!
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You can’t return your Christmas present half-eaten!
I work back of house at a Toys R Us. I spent Black Friday taking big-ticket items to the back where we just loaded them into the customers car instead of trying to make our way to the front of the store.Apparently, someone decided it was fine to wander into the back storage room and start opening boxes to find what they wanted. Other customers saw this one jackass do it, and then decided it was ok if they did too.Myself and the other back of house guys were busy wrestling with a really obnoxious bed set, so when I made it to the other side of our back storage, I found like 8-10 people just taking cases off our bays and opening them, then tossing them aside if they didn’t want it. They claimed there was nothing indicating they couldn’t come back there. We have a two signs on the swinging door saying “Employees Only” and “Warning: Only authorized personal beyond this point!”
2. KnowMatter
Back in my poor college days when I worked at Walmart we had a fight break out over a bike. Fists were thrown and there was some blood. Eventually one guy got ahold of it and managed to get away from the crowd, he rode the bike out of the store to flee his pursuers (without paying).
3. Lineman72T
Worked security at Target for 5+ years. For being a store in the rougher part of town, I don’t have too many horror stories. The funniest one I like to tell is a couple years ago, I was there early doing crowd control. I would always talk to people in line, try to keep them entertained while they waited in the cold. The first couple in line had been there for about 13 or 14 hours. So we open the store, and we have deals on all sorts of electronics, toys, etc. They get in line and have a shopping cart full of towels that we had on sale for $2. That’s it. Just towels. They were first in line outside and waited over half a day for $2 towels. When I left after my 12 hour shift, we still had shelves full of these towels, along with tons more in the stockroom.
4. Kidou
I worked for six years at a Johnny rockets in a mall as a server and management. We didn’t open early like the rest of the stores because we are a restaurant and well, we don’t serve breakfast.
Had people shake our gates screaming that they wanted food. It would be just me and an opener getting the chairs set out.
I pointed them towards the food court and told them we didn’t serve breakfast. A lady spit at me and told.me “I know you have bacon”
We do. In a fridge waiting to be cooked and put on a burger.
5. lezbatron
Working in the electronics dept. A little old lady punched a teenage boy in the face to get the last radio he had picked up. She snatched it up and ran.
6. wildcard084
Walmart story time. A couple years ago when the sale started there was a surge of people trying to get their stuff. One lady got knocked down and her pen went straight into her neck thankfully missing the jugular. The fucked up part is no one tried to help they just walked over her to get their shitty deal items. An associate that saw it happen had to stand over her to protect her from getting trampled. When the ambulance crew arrived they had to literally shove people out of the way because no one would move. People suck.
7. InfinityKitty
I worked at Walmart for 4 years and worked all Black Fridays. I’ve seen a woman hit another woman in the chest with those toddler car boxes you drive in. Woman who got hit was a week or 3 post op of open heart surgery. Lots of blood. Right In front of me. No idea what happened to the woman who hit her. I do think she got the toy car purchased it and left.
8. Wildfires
My first black Friday, I was working at a Walmart. I was assigned to be one of the employees that would cut open the plastic on the pallets, which contained our merchandise, which were all in the floor. Basically, as I readied box cutter, a customer shoved me and I fell right on it and sliced my hand open. After getting through that and patching it up, I came out on the floor and promptly got punched in the face when I picked up a DVD on the ground. A customer apparently wanted it. Fuck black Friday.
9. Nickdubs
When I worked at Sam’s Club, during the madness one black Friday morning, we caught a woman stuffing the inside of her pants with frozen lobster tail. She would unpack them and throw the trash in a stack of tires that were on display.
10. The_Dingman
A simple one, not a horror story, but funny. I managed a RadioShack store in a mall. An old lady came in with her walker for a new battery for her cordless phone, completely oblivious to what day it was. She asked me if the mall was always so busy.
11. g0mmmme
Lets just say if I hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” it brings back Vietnam-like memories.
12. gointhefridge
Ex Best Buy here. Four Black Fridays at the highest grossing store that day in the company gets you a few wild tales. This one is quick:
Guy tried to shove a Panasonic Blu-ray player into the front of his jeans. He was a rather large man, but dude its a Blu-ray player, seriously.
13. Jsquaw
I worked at RadioShack for a year in college. During Black Friday, one of the sale items was a $10 calculator marked down to $5. Two sweet, elderly women came in to the store looking for them. When I told them there was only one left in the display, the shit was ON.
It turned in to a geriatric version of roller derby without the skates. The one grandma who lost the race called the other one a “fucking bitch” as she was standing in the checkout line, gripping her $5 prize.
I always imagined some little kid opening presents on Christmas morning and getting this stupid $5 calculator, not really wanting it and having no clue about the back story behind it, as his grandma, sipping her tea, looks on with a triumphant gleam in her eye.
14. JerseyScarletPirate
Grocery store on Thanksgiving checking in: I got to recently tell a story of how I got in trouble for cursing off a customer who wouldn’t move for an ambulance because a woman had a stroke while inside the store.
I think the stroke victim died, the customer I cursed off got a $200 gift card, and I got reprimanded.
15. Pooter_McGee
I was fired a week before because I told a very elderly lady she shouldn’t come in on Black Friday. She said she was afraid of getting hurt, and I agreed and let her know that we would have other great sales during the rest of the holidays. Little did I know my HR rep was listening in around the corner. She said that I wasn’t driving sales and she’d have to report the situation to the manager.
I got the axe a week later.
16. stormclaw11
I was a GameStop Worker when the Wii came out. The second we unlocked the doors, shit was a riot. People were fighting one-another, swearing, crying, just about everything. People were so desperate, when people managed to get one, somebody would throw the other person to the ground and buy it.
17. ms_fits
Someone punched a security guard in the face because he thought he was a customer skipping to the front of the line. He was just walking in the door to start his shift. So yeah, my town has those kind of people in it.
18. IUsedToBeSomebody
I watched a woman collapse in hysterics into my manager’s arms because we didn’t have the exact model of cooler she wanted. Thanksgiving must be a stressful time in her family.
19. troublesmoker
I worked at the Walmart in Green Acres mall in Valley Stream, NY. Was working the day one of my fellow co-workers got crushed to death by a large crowd who broke the doors and gate outside. That moment changed Black Friday for the retail world forever. I quit after that, was not ready to lose my life to some TVs.
20. madamimadam89
I saw an elderly woman steal an ice cream maker out of a man in a wheelchair’s electric handicapped cart. He got a security guard, and she flat out denied it saying the man was using his handicap to embarrass her. I lost a little faith in humanity in that moment. I followed her and took stuff out of her cart and put it back on the shelves and put random, embarrassing items in their place.
21. starfoxbella
I used to work at Victoria’s Secret PINK and my first Black Friday, I was at the front of the store. People were already outside waiting to get in at midnight. When the doors opened, I was pushed backwards and almost fell to the ground; luckily I fell on our launch table. I climbed the table and stayed up there throwing customers hoodies and yoga pants. It was fun yelling, “green hoodie, size small, who wants it?” And everyone jumping and yelling for it. Also, a girl fainted and I had to push people from walking all over her.
22. Irnewtoreddit
Former Best Buy employee. First Black Friday, had 9 of them, saw two 60+ elderly ladies get into a fist fight over a 9.99 scanner. Think Lexmark or something. The one lady had an amazing right cross.
23. novapine
I worked one black Friday in the clothes department at Walmart. For like 2 straight hours before the sale began, people hovered over the pallets. The alarm went off and the swarm just went insane.
There were two women in particular on opposite sides, tossing clothes back and forth to each other. I don’t know what their system was because half the stuff they were just catching and tossing aside. But this little teenager (I mean like petite tiny girl) intercepted a pair of jeans being tossed and the women went fucking INSANE and elbowed her in the face. Instant blood and the little girl was so shocked she just stood there shaking and crying. The woman acted like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I pulled her out of the crowd and started to walk her to get her cleaned up when the sheriff appeared out of nowhere. The best part was she was his kid and the woman was arrested on the spot. She had to post bail AND pay full price for her shitty Levi’s.
24. nnnaaaiii
Not a worker but a shopper one dark Black Friday morning…
I was at an Urban Outfitters in San Diego looking at clothes at 4:30 in the morning when there is this shriek coming from the girls section. All the guys (there were only like 8 of us) all run over to watch these two 100 pound teenage blonde haired entitled girls just going at it over some dress. No one was stopping them and then this little Asian girl walked out into the middle and slowly grabbed the dress while the girls were fighting and backed out of the circle. She calmly went to buy it while the two girls were ripping out each other’s hair and their mom’s were trying to stop them.
25. DandyDoodleDude
Last year I pointed somebody in the wrong direction to find a toy amidst the river of other crazy people trying to masturbate with my elevated stress level. Quickly realizing my dumb, I ran to find where Dora was really hiding, picked her up, toted her around the whole damn store until I found the lady, and then, as if I was expecting some kind of diamond studded praise like “thanks,” I stupidly hesitated just a second too long.
She grabbed my arm and leaned in a little too close and smiled, “it’s a damn good thing you came back,” motioning down with her chin to her purse, pulled out the butt of a pistol just long enough for me to blink and pull away from her, “because I was coming back to find ya!”
She then waddled her murderous little way back to the line where her kids had been waiting since we opened.
26. Folkyourfaceoff
Sam’s Club does a Black Sunday or something before the actual Black Friday for plus members. Some dipshit 20 year old threw food on the floor, purposefully slipped in it and gave himself a concussion, puking all over the place like a goddamn fool.
He got no money from us because Sam’s has cameras everywhere.
27. I-am-Gizmoduck
I used to work at Circuit City, and I saw an old woman get shoved into a stack of Lava Lamps (that were free with any purchase). It was surreal to see.
Another co-worker and I waded through the crowd to get help her, and she was really shaken up.
28. bestincal
Not really a “horror story”, but I used to work at Best Buy and worked home theater my first Black Friday. Store opens at 6am Friday. Guy walks in. Walks up to me, while I’m wearing my khaki pants and best Buy polo. He looks at me and asks, “do you work here?” I look at my Best Buy logo on my polo, then to my name-tag, then up at him and say “Nope”. He just walked away.
29. PityandFear
I worked at Target for 5 years as an electronics team lead and I saw some gnarly shit. The worst though was probably when I saw a man throw a 42″ TV at another man for cutting in line. The man that received the Westinghouse to the face received a concussion and several stitches while the thrower got multiple blows to the face from surrounding customers, an assault charge, and at least one night in county. Good times. I have more if anyone is interested.
30. gingerkid818
Some one pepper sprayed a crowd of people for an Xbox 2 years ago. Here is the aftermath video. There is a guy on the floor in the middle of the crowd.
31. bunny_pellets
So it was Black Friday 2003 and I’m in the “r-zone” in toys R Us ringing up a customer. Suddenly I see a co-worker up on the tallest ladder getting an assembled bike down from the ceiling. Here comes this crazy lady, bangs her cart several times into his ladder saying he’s in her way. He fell a good 10 feet off the ladder and the ladder crashed to the side. Lady said, ” you shouldn’t have been in the way!!” Rolls her cart away. Coworker was rushed to ER! Snapped his wrist in half. I will never shop/work Black Friday Ever!
32. takeitfromme503
Working at Best Buy I was in charge of the Home Theater register on Black Friday. There was a woman in line who leaned over vomited in the floor then stepped back in line. Didn’t skip a beat.
33. Psychobilly2175
My friend worked at a Walmart in our city a few years back during Black Friday when a woman was trampled to death by a mob of shoppers.
34. WomanInTheGarden
I worked at Starbucks, and Black Friday there is a little scary. Everyone at the mall wanting to get coffee and get back to the lines for the big stores. I was the person on the door helping people stay in a semi-organized line as they rushed in. These two middle-aged ladies were arguing about who got there first. Then they started pushing and screaming about getting back to Target in time. Then crazy lady #1 takes a coffee cup off of the shelf and chucks it at crazy lady #2’s head. Only she doesn’t hit crazy lady #2, she hits innocent bystander #1 who retaliates by grabbing stuff off of the condiment bar a throwing it at both crazy ladies. This shortly becomes a free-for-all of people throwing stuff. I, being pretty small and not willing to jump into a group of people chucking stuff, hid behind the counter with my coworkers and called security and the police. We let them sort it out, and ended up closing and serving coffee to the police and security guards while we cleaned up the mess.
35. setafortasay
Not a horror story, but I got a good one. The best thing I have ever seen was this woman who was acting really suspicious. I followed her around and she ended up in the isle with all the towels. Low and behold she had gone in to the store a couple days before and hid all the sale items in between the towels. I was really impressed so I let her walk.
A Gameboy with a sardine can inside. A printer stuffed with a piñata. ‘Return fraud’ is costing retailers billions—and the ingenious swindles are sometimes breathtaking.
She appeared to be just a happy American consumer out shopping at a big-box store.On one summer lunch hour, Donna Ann Levonuk, 50, lifted a tub of diaper cream priced at $43.98—and then stashed it in her purse. No alarms were triggered as she strolled out of the Giant supermarket in Limerick, Pennsylvania, and nobody thought otherwise.Until Levonuk reappeared an hour later wielding the soothing stuff at another Giant store 20 minutes away.
That’s when the jig was up.
“She had couple of fictitious rewards cards—but this time she used one of her own,” said Ernie Morris, a detective with the Limerick Township Police Department who foiled the spree of bogus returns. “When they steal things, they want to get all the bonus points.”
She also had a spending habit.
“As quick as they were going out, they were getting stuff—living a lifestyle where they wanted luxury.”
Return fraud has been called the invisible heist—or “de-shopping.” But the increasing number of fraudsters bringing back wares to stores to make an illicit killing has become impossible to ignore.
Expensive items, such as $400 handbags, might be stolen and then returned for in-store credit that is issued to the conniving customer in the form of a gift card.
Then the gift card is shopped online in a gray market to collect cold currency.
“It’s like the Wild West for trading gift cards,” Moraca told The Daily Beast. “People will buy your $100 gift card for $82, and if you want the cash bad enough you’ll do that.”
Gift cards are sold at kiosks in shopping malls or even websites that catering to this exchange market. Some have innocuous-seeming URLs like cardpool.com or giftcardgranny.com, which cloak the sinister operations.
“By selling the gift card online, [criminals] can receive up to 80 percent of the retail value,versus 10-20 percent on the street corner,” said Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention at Retail Partners, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm.
Siras’ Dustin Ares pointed to one organized crime ring that used eBay as its clearinghouse.
This return scam involved purchasing broken electronics off the auction site and then buying new items off store shelves. “They would go to the store with a repackaged and shrink-wrapped broken item inside a new box and return it for full value.”
The clever crooks managed to rack up $2 million in profits over a year, Ares said.
New numbers out today reveal the extent of the “shrinkage.” According to the National Retail Federation, the tally of red from return fraud this yearis a whopping $10.9 billion in the U.S., based on figures from 60 retailers surveyed. Holiday shopping season alone accounts for $3.6 billion.
“The losses to the industry have moved up $1 billion-plus from a year ago,” said Bob Moraca, the NRF’s vice president of loss prevention. “I am frightened by how much of this is caused by organized retail crime.”
In some cases, the scammers’ tactics are so intricate that it’s hard to believe how much talent is wasted on the effort to cheat businesses out of everyday items.
The industry lore is downright jaw-dropping in the details of the cons known as “brick-in-box” returns.
“Even the retailers themselves don’t realize how extensive this is,”said Dustin Ares, a loss-prevention specialist at SIRAS, a Redmond, Washington, company that develops advanced tracking tools for electronics.
A digital media player’s mainframe is replaced with eight AA batteries, or a deck of cards. Or the device that looks like Gameboy from the front. But try to turn the sucker on—and good luck: The sardine can that’s inside isn’t going to produce much gaming.
One customer retooled a Nintendo Wii with its innards switched out for glued pennies. Another sent back a flat-screen television with a bona fide tombstone within. Another returned a printer box stuffed with a candy-filled piñata.
Laughs aside, the methods can take on other, less spirited forms.
Moraca pointed to another form of return fraud, involving gift cards.
Retailers were hammered by the scheme because checks and balances were scant in 2012, when the eBay grifting peaked.“If you don’t have any record, you don’t know who to believe,” he added.
That’s just with the physical items that you can see.
Ares said there are instances where savvy gankers manage to exploit loopholes.
For instance, “A guy goes around and purchases expensive items and at the same time buys into the extended service plan. Then he calls the service-plan provider and claims the items were in disrepair and asks ‘What can you do about this?’”
A refund for the service plan was executed, and according to Ares, this particular shakedown artist hit the company offering the service plan more than 200 times in two weeks—each time pocketing a couple Benjamins in an insurance settlement with little to no need to prove anything was faulty.
“The company would continue to refund these goodwill refunds.”
Like Donna Levonuk and her husband, Manuel—who ended up getting slapped with more than a 1,000 counts of felonies, including forgery, records tampering, and deception when they milked one store after the other—their schemes were more of the harebrained variety.
And yet brazen bandits prove time and again they are willing to try to return anything.
Bill Hedrick, chief of staff for the city attorney’s office in Columbus, Ohio, says he’s found people combing parking lots outside major stores hoping to luck out on rogue receipts to tender inside for a score.
Some have been willing to try to bring to the registers multiple box sets of popular music or TV shows only to get nabbed pulling a fast one on the checkout clerk.
“The Sopranos box set was maybe $88,” Hedrick told The Daily Beast. “They take a .88 cent sticker off reject videos and put it on The Sopranos and two others and then go to the cashier lane.
“Even the cashier realizes that they were trying to get away with $300 worth of box sets for $3.”
And maybe even Tony Soprano might have respected the paint switcheroo that suckered employees at several Wal-Mart locations, according to a security chief at a major corporation.
The perpetrators idled in parking lots outside various Wal-Marts and approached customers with cans of paint to ask for the customers to forfeit the cans so they can be used to collect money for their school sports teams.
“They would get the cans and bring them back to the stores but they didn’t have any paint in them,” said the source, who requested anonymity. “Instead, they filled them up with water. This happened over a dozen times before they caught on.”
The industry as a whole has been cracking down.
Joseph LaRocca says some companies are upping the ante in terms of fending off return fraudsters.
For instance, with the illicit gift cards being fenced online there’s been some measures put in place to prevent thieves from pawning them willy-nilly.
“Some retailers have sent legal notices to these marketplaces to restrict the resale of cards, while others are using sophisticated technology to block these companies from checking the value of the cards online,” LaRocca said.
And Dustin Ares notes better communication has been working.
“We’re getting ahead of it now to be sure,” Ares said. “We employ inventory management to help solidify their property and make sure they have a better record of their possessions.”
Det. Morris, who brought the Levonuks to justice, says that indeed more retailers are trying to share what they know with law enforcement, but it’s an uphill battle when most follow the adage that the customer—even the crooked customer—is always right.
“Most places don’t wan to prosecute and so they give more rights to the customer than anybody else,” he said, stressing that the crime isn’t victimless since the cost rises for the innocent consumer. “In the end, we as customers suffer because we’re stupid enough to pay $40 for a T-shirt.”
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