Retail worker forced to deal with entitled mom and her 4 screaming children: '[She] let them loose to play tag/Marco Polo in the aisles'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Feb 1, 2025 2:00 PM EST

Retail workers should not have to deal with child wrangling while on the job. Unfortunately, there are far too many entitled and lazy parents in this world, which means that when families with young kids enter a store, the parents slack off while the kids run amok. 

This inevitably leaves parental responsibilities to the retail workers. Not only are these folks already severely underpaid and overworked, they now have to be overwhelmed by the concern that these kids will break something or cause a mess. The child wrangling then becomes necessary so that these poor retail workers don't have to do even more work cleaning up whatever damage these screaming, running children are bound to cause. Check out this retail worker's savvy form of petty revenge to force parents to look after their kids…

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    5 "Want to let your children run around a store? Now you can be as worried as the workers are"
    via Oxana Melis

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • This employee understood from personal experience that any time you tell the parents of a misbehaving kid to get their offspring under control, the parents are likely to lash out and double down on the disruptive behavior. Instead, this worker figured out how to indirectly cause the parents to step up to the plate, an act we wish they did not feel the need to do while fulfilling their normal job responsibilities. But hey, this is the world we live in…

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    This happened years ago while I was working at a craft store. Like most craft stores there were walls of glass, ceramic and other very breakable very sharp items
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    for sale and this day I was stocking one of these fragile sections. A woman came in with what felt like 10+ children under 15, but turned out to only be 4
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    kids and let them loose to play tag/Marco polo in the aisles while she shopped. After I had collided twice with these kids because they weren't watching where they were going I decided to hunt
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    down the mom before they or i got hurt. I had worked well enough customer service to know that if you ask directly for them to control their kids they would get mad and refuse out of principle
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    more often than not. I decided to be sneaky and stand in the same aisle as her and pretend to be stocking something near her and spoke into my work headset without actually pressing the button:
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    "Hey, did anyone get the broken glass from aisle 13?.. no? Okay then I'll be over there in just a moment to get that cleaned up."
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    Suddenly the lady realized there might actually be danger in letting your young children sprint around a store and she immediately gathered them all up
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    and they stayed by her side for the rest of the trip. After this I used it every time a customer decided we were their free childcare and it worked about 90% of the time.
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    mostats €3
    via Oxana Melis

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • Several members of the online community applauded the employee for working out a clever solution that managed to avoid confrontation and further conflict. Sure, these parents may not have cared that the retail workers might have to clean up after their kids, but they certainly started to care when it seemed like their kids might cause them distress.

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    Gadgetman 1 · 7h ago The last 10% probably hoped their kids would get hurt so that they could sue the store...
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    Kaychees .7h ago Nice! Well played. I don't understand parents who just let their annoying kids be other people's problems. You were much calmer and more collected than I would have ever been.
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    Euphoric-Chemica... . 7h ago The first time I read the title, I thought it said CHICKEN instead of children so I patiently waited through the entire post to find out where the chicken comes from. Time for bed.
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    lunarkitty554.6h ago I had a coworker who was a mom herself, and there was a maybe 6 year old kid doing cartwheels around the store while the mom didn't care,
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    so coworker decided to just start dressing down the kid herself who was so shocked she stopped instantly and the mom was so embarrassed they left very quickly
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    • Fickle_Grapefruit9... 6h ago Lol, it's a bit like the time my BIL warned the kids lighting fireworks in the alley behind his house that he saw cops in the street, the kids yelled thank you and sprinted off to light them elsewhere
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    ThginkAccbeR 6h ago • I'm wondering if it's not so much that she realised it wasn't safe or that she was worried her kids had broken the glass and if someone asked her, she could've said "oh no, they've been out here with me the whole time!"
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    daffydil0459 · 6h ago Decades ago I worked at a store we'll call Big Mart. Someone let their child run wild, and the kid was running wild with a random shopping cart. They ran into an elderly woman and hurt her badly. Yeah, control your child or leave them at home.
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    inferni_advocatvs 7h ago Also raising a knee to chest or face level and letting them barrel into you works wonders.
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    still-dazed-confus... .7h ago Hopefully you broke her of the habit :) People don't change their behaviour unless there's something in it for them or they feel or expect pain. It's a sad truth that pain is a great teacher. Rewarding good behaviour is a kinder but slower method.
    via Mellowodds
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    Chaosmusic · 5h ago . The worst is parents letting kids play around in a restaurant where servers are carrying around sizzling hot plates.
    via Mellowodds

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Tags

entitled parents retail retail worker petty revenge parenting entitled people karma tales-from-retail Parenting Fail entitled people Parenting FAILS
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