23 People Reveal The Most F*cked Up Thing They’ve Seen While Shopping
By Brian Gates
1. I was once peed at by a total stranger in a grocery store parking lot. I was on my lunch break and I’d stopped at a nearby Winn-Dixie to get something from the deli. As I was walking towards the store, a motion caught my eye. I looked over to find a man sitting halfway out of his car, butt on the seat but feet on the ground…and peeing. We made eye contact. I was totally dumbstruck…so he cackled and waggled the damn thing at me, spraying pee all over around his feet.
I still don’t know WTF to think.
2. Went to the bathroom at a Kroger and heard a homeless guy moaning very audibly in one of the stalls. Thought he was wackin’ it, so I high-tailed it out of there as fast as I could. When I left it was just me and the homeless guy in there, but about ten seconds after I get out I see the bathroom door open….and two homeless guys walk out.
3. I saw a 50-year-old guy taking a shit in the urinal at a Barnes & Noble. He pulled up his pants right as I walked in. The stall wasn’t even occupied, he chose to use the urinal.
4. Me and a friend enter local speedway. As we cash out man comes around the corner with no shirt pants or underwear. As he walks by to check out greeting cards I notice he has shit covering his leg. We all stand in total silence as cashier rings us up.
– SeaMiner
5. Two or three years ago i was at Home Depot at like 8:00pm on Black Friday. My dipshit cat ate a majority of our last (fake) tree so it was time to replace it (and the cat). Home Depot was having a decent sale on fake tree’s so i figured wtf, can’t hurt to see if any are left.
I stroll into the store and of course it’s busy. I go over to the fake tree area and there’s a couple of people wandering around. I find the display of the tree that’s on sale, holy shit, there’s ONE left. I go back around the corner, grab a cart and start putting the tree in the cart. Out of nowhere this mid-50s lady flat freaks the fuck out. She tells me “That’s MY tree, take it out of your cart now!”. I tell her quite politely, to go fuck herself as it was on the shelf and she was no where near it. This sends her into black friday rage and she starts trying to get the tree out of my cart.
At this point I’m done with her shit, pull my cart away and tell her to have a nice Christmas. She loses her shit and proceeds to whip our her cell phone. I take my cart and head to the checkout line (Which they have fucking TWO open out of 10 queues, but i digress). After a couple of minutes the manager of the store asks me if he could speak to me at the customer service desk.
I wander over and lo and behold, there’s batshit crazy bitch standing there with a big ‘ol shit-eating grin on her face. Next to her is a fucking cop! Apparently she called 911 when she got her phone out and told them she was assaulted and then I took her fucking tree. The cop pulls me aside and asks my side of things. I explain and I could already tell he feels batshit crazy lady is indeed batshit crazy. The manager then tells the officer that their camera’s that watch the checkout lines shows the xmas tree area as well. Cop and manager wander to the magic video viewing area leaving me with BCL standing there. She tells me “Guess you won’t be having such a Merry Christmas after all” to which i reply “Fuck off and die”.
In the end, officer and manager come out, officer gives lady a summons to appear for filing a false police report, disturbing the peace and some other charge I can’t quite remember. This cause her to go Stallone over the top batshit and freak on the officer. Another officer arrives and takes BCL away. Officer apologizes and states the video showed clearly that she was nowhere NEAR me, nor did I physically touch her, let alone assault her. Home Depot manager profusely apologizes and winds up giving me the tree for free.
6. I was at Target and someone in the next aisle over yelled “MARCO!” and naturally I replied “POLO!”
They then said “THAT’S NOT FUNNY.”
– Anonymous
7. Ran across a large human crap in the very middle of the shoe aisle of K-Mart.
8. I saw a man masturbating at a Barnes and Noble too. A barista in the cafe yelled for security, the man started to run, another customer decked out in full cowboy gear (boots, hat, everything) leapt out of his chair, chased him down, and held on to him until the police arrived.
Actually not the weirdest thing I’ve seen while shopping, but had to share considering the similar circumstances.
9. I was in the Sci-fi section browsing, when a little boy (couldn’t have been more than 7) came running into the aisle and sat down about 5 feet away from me. He was holding what looked like a giant photography book. He nervously glanced up and down the aisle to make sure the coast was clear. He then started to flip furiously through the pages of the book which of course turned out to be a Kama sutra guide book complete with real live pictures of various positions. My jaw hit the floor and I started laughing out loud but the kid didn’t even notice I was there. I tried to ignore him and keep browsing but this kid’s face was priceless! About a minute later his Dad found him and gave him the most furious talking to I’ve ever witnessed in a store. Poor little guy didn’t even put up a fight…
10. I heard a woman peeing on the floor in the dressing room at Kohl’s. The attendant wasn’t shocked.
– Anonymous
11. I was shopping at Safeway once, buying beer and candy as usual, and I notice the man in front of me at the cash register line looked kinda like Jack Nicholson. Just thought it to myself. But he looked like a younger Jack Nicholson, maybe from 20 years ago.
Anyway, he started talking to me- in a strange way, like when a crazy homeless person starts talking to you trying to be friendly, but they’re crazy so it’s always weird. He opened the conversation rather cryptically, I can hardly remember it exactly, it was along the lines of, “The more one hears they look like Jesus, the more they become like Him.” I should mention here I have long dreadlocked hair and a bit of a beard, but it still took me a minute to realize what he was talking about, then I got it and said, “Oh! Oh, yeah, I get that a lot, haha.”
Here he smiled the way Jack Nicholson smiles, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. It was creepy but cool. Just like JN.
“Haha, I bet,” said Jack Nicholson Man. “I used to have long hair like yours too, man, and people would tell me the same thing.” He continued just chatting with me, even when another cash register opened and the cashier said they could take the next person in line, I went over there, and he just came with me, just talking, always smiling the JN smile. He went on and on, saying things like, “But you’re not like those other people, man, you’re not judgmental. I can tell by your smile. You’re free.”
I really like talking to crazy people like this- for some reason crazy people talk to me a lot, probably because I’m sort of sketchy looking myself, so they see me as one of their own. I have a few stories about meeting homeless people and talking with them for an hour.
So anyway, just before I left, he actually said to me, “It’s like Jack Nicholson said in that movie – they don’t hate you cause you have long hair and ride a motorcycle, they hate you because you’re free.” And at the word “free” he not only smiled like that, he did the Jack Nicholson eyebrow thing!! exactly like Jack Nicholson does!! There is NO ONE in the world who does that other than Jack Nicholson, especially someone who looks like Jack Nicholson who does that.
So. I’m about…16% positive that I actually met the real Jack Nicholson in that Safeway. I’m probably about 54% sure it was Jack Nicholson from 1991 who time travelled to 2011 to go shopping in Montana, and 30% sure that it was just a crazy old man who resembled Jack Nicholson, and realized it, and decided to practice so he could imitate Jack Nicholson in his every day life.
Then, after I paid, he said something like, “Be well, brother.”
And that’s the story of how I met Time Travelling Jack Nicholson Doppelganger at Safeway.
– Anonymous
12. I worked at a bookstore for a while and occasionally we would have to push up the ceiling tiles in the men’s room to check for books. Usually we would find a few gay magazines. We would throw them in a box and return them to the vendor.
– jmau5
13. At the Westfield Mall in SF two women in front of me got on the escalator with a dog. Just before I was about to get on the dog dropped a gallon of diarrhea.
I managed to jam the anchors on before getting on what was now a shit coaster. The most foul thing I’ve ever smelled.
I dread to think the amount of maintenance required to clear that up. And I do not envy the mall cop posted to “guard” it. I feel lucky I don’t have that kind of bollocks to deal with to earn a crust.
Oh yeah, the kicker – it was the escalator to the food court. Grim.
Wasn’t that crazy but it sticks in my mind. Crazy would be the smack addict I nearly had a fight with after he made a grab for someone’s food at the table next to me. Terrified the poor lady.
– Anonymous
14. I was in a supermarket buying groceries, and I was in the meat aisle. It was a reasonably crowded supermarket, and not in a bad neighborhood either.
There was an Asian family shopping. It was an older (40s) woman, a younger woman and 2 young kids. They were minding their own business looking at some meat. A large dude walks by and starts looking at steaks. He picks a couple up and puts them in his hand basket. Nothing strange.
I’m minding my own business, so I don’t really know how this happened, but I hear him yell out, “You fucking gooks!” and the sounds of people struggling, then someone falling. When I turn around, I see the two again women on the floor, yelling loudly, with their kids also yelling. I also see a pissed off dude walking away muttering something.
I then notice the steaks littering the floor, and a pool of what I can only assume is piss on the floor.
Apparently, one of the kids pissed on the floor, and the guy got angry and then slapped the two women with some steaks.
I was utterly dumbfounded.
15. My friend was once at a Walmart with all of his asian friends from church (they’re all Korean) when some random guy pointed at them and then the toy section and screamed “Made in China!”
– accomman
16. I live and work in Japan.
I went grocery shopping, then decided to go to the McDonald’s in the food court to eat dinner. I saw two of my former students, girls, sitting there eating, so I said hi, we talked a bit, then I went back to my dinner.
While I was eating, this weird-looking old man in a too-tight t-shirt and wild Doc Brown-style hair came up and started talking to them. They didn’t seem too concerned, and he wasn’t doing anything obviously strange, so I just kept on eating while keeping an eye on him. Eventually he left them and they made eye contact with me, shrugging.
Then, he came back with a battered cardboard box. He started pulling out old little kids’ toys, like miniature robots and plastic dogs and shit, and putting them on the table. He topped it off by pulling out individually-wrapped cookies and offering them to the girls. They were obviously, by this point, leaning away from him and getting really weirded out. I texted one of them and asked if they wanted me to help out, and she said yes.
Just before I stood up, the guy started pulling out glossy collector’s photos of teen idols in swimsuits, showing them to the girls and saying how nice they were. Oh, crossed a line there, man.This guy obviously had some problems and I didn’t want to cause a big scene, so I walked over and said hi again, trying to strike up a conversation with the man. He wasn’t having any of it, he started yelling at me and packing his stuff into the box angrily, calling me a pervert and a sexual harasser. The girls were looking more and more awkward and scared by the second. The guy starts getting up in my face and is seriously screaming. People aren’t walking by the food court anymore, and the McDonald’s staff is just staring at us.
I’m trying to calm the guy down but he’s not having any of it. At the same time, I tell the girls to just go home and forget about it; they ask if I’m sure, and I’m very, very sure. I don’t want them involved in this — this guy is obviously off his rocker and/or dangerous. They go.
The guy takes this as a cue to shift up a gear, apparently. He throws his box of stuff on the ground and pushes me while screaming about calling the police on me, a would-be rapist. He screams about his yakuza connections who will track me down, how he used to be in the military, and how everyone in Japan hates foreigners like me, and how they’re going to put me in jail for a long time. He’s screaming at the people watching (who have been watching for the last 20 minutes, doing nothing) about how terrible a person I am and half of them are just nodding. The McDonald’s staff are just standing at the counter watching, too, when they’re not serving orders.
Finally, the man leaves.I go up to the grocery store’s rent-a-cop, a middle-aged woman, and ask her to call the police. I really don’t want that guy walking around my neighborhood where all of my students live. She says she can’t really do anything about it, and when I’m about to protest, the man comes storming back in and grabs me, brandishing something I can’t make out because he’s waving it all over the place.
He says he’s brought proof of everything he was saying and waves it in my face.
Of course, I can’t read it, because he’s waving it around, so I ask him to stop so I can read it.
He stops, and it’s obviously a handicapped license, saying he’s got a second-grade mental handicap (Japan’s system rates handicaps from fourth to first grades, first being the most severe). I honestly don’t know what to do now. This guy is off his rocker.
The guy’s screaming at me again about some shit, and I just give up. I walk back to my table with him screaming at me, grab my groceries with him screaming at me, throw away my trash with him screaming at me, shrug at the crowd with him screaming at me, walk out the door with him screaming at me, get on my bicycle with him screaming at me… and he stops screaming.
Wait, what? I’m so confused.
I turn around and he’s squatting on the ground, trying to read my bike’s registration sticker and write down the number. That’s just too much.
I pushed off, biked away, and he started running after me.
I biked faster and never saw him again.
– Anonymous
17. Not my story, but a friend sent this to me. Had to share.
So once upon a time, back in Summer of 2010, I arrived at my place of work (Hollister Co. at Cottonwood Mall in West Albuquerque). It was approx. 11am.
I walked in, and as I clocked in, my manager, Chris, informed me that mall security had confiscated a large amount of stolen merchandise, and that he was going to have to run down to the security office to pick it up. I was going to be the only model in the store, and there was one impacter doing back stock. He told me to contact him on my walkie-talkie in case of an emergency… How ironic.
As he left, a girl (carrying at least 15 graphic t-shirts) approached the fitting rooms. She was, for lack of better words, dressed very “hood.” She asked me to unlock a fitting room. I explained to her that she could only bring in 5 items at once, and she responded very poorly to this. I received a large amount of attitude from her as I got her situated in her fitting room.
5 minutes passed. At approx. 11:10, a women and her daughter approached the fitting rooms. I got them situated.
5 more minutes passed. I was ringing up a customer when the woman (frantic) emerged from the fitting rooms. She explained to me that somebody, in the fitting room to her left, was bleeding.I was confused.
I went into the bathroom and grabbed a few paper towels. I was expecting a bloody nose. I waltzed into the fitting room area, and couldn’t believe my eyes. The floor of the first girl’s stall (the one who gave me attitude) was a pool of blood. I kid you not, there was a puddle.
I am extremely squeamish. I approached the door with caution and knocked. I, turning white, informed her that I brought paper towels (like they were even going to be remotely helpful). She informed me that she didn’t have pants on. I told her “it’s okay, it’s just me”. She opened the door.
She was standing there, pantsless, grabbing her hand. I had so many questions going through my head, when she removed her hand and blood started squirting everywhere. No, I am not being dramatic. I hardly remember this part, but I have a very vivid image in my head of her thumb hanging off of her hand by a measly piece of skin.
I felt very light-headed at this point. I called my manager on the walkie-talkie and told him that he needed to get back to the store immediately, and the woman (who had informed me of the blood) called 911. I went into the back room and yelled for Ryan (back-stock dude). I started crying and all that I could get out was “girl cut off her thumb”. He started laughing. I was like “Ryan, I’m fucking serious!” He followed me back into the fitting rooms, and as soon as I saw the puddle of blood again, I passed out.
I re-gained consciousness a few seconds later, and got up. I sat down on the floor while my manager arrived and began to take control of the situation. The girl somehow managed to put on a pair of sweatpants (that she had come into the store wearing) and informed us that she was “fine” and “leaving.” Homegirl straight up wanted to LEAVE. She was bleeding everywhere and white as a ghost and somehow thought she was just going to walk out of the store…
So the ambulance arrived. They took her. Tried to take me, as well (lol). Then poison control came and cleaned up the fitting rooms/confiscated the clothes that she had damaged (5 nasty, blood-soaked t-shirts).
What happened: She came in with the intention of stealing. She brought a pocket knife, which she had planned to use to cut off the censors from the clothes. The sensors in HCo are made of plastic on the outside, but she was unaware that they are metal on the inside. When she attempted to remove her first sensor, the knife slipped on the metal and sliced off her thumb.
– Anonymous
18. Shortly after moving to a new city, my younger brother and I were attending an outdoor summer market type thing (think farmers market + kitschy hippie stuff) and once we’d had our fill of hemp products and falafel, sat down at the bus stop to get a ride home.
It wasn’t more than 2 minutes after sitting down, that a mime, fully decked out in classic black and white striped mime get-up, face paint and everything comes running past us, and I mean BOOKING IT as fast as his little mime legs can go.
We barely have time to comprehend what the hell that was when this huge, screaming, shouting mob of clowns, at least 15, maybe twice that many, come bolting after the mime like a stampede. We watched them chase him at least 4 blocks until we couldn’t see them past the traffic anymore.
I still have no idea what happened there, and I can only hope that mime wasn’t brutally clowned to death.
19. One time I was in Wal-Mart check out line and a man in a full body banana suit sprinted all the way across the entire front of the store and out into the parking lot. This was one of those massive Wal-Marts, and I happened to notice him just as he ran in the door at the far end. Following him, close behind and sprinting like his life depended on it, was a man in a giant gorilla suit. I swear none of the shoppers in the store noticed except me.
20. I saw some fat kid sit on a shelf in the toy aisle of Target and the entire thing broke in half.
– Anonymous
21. A guy kissed my foot in Wal-Mart once. I am so gullible. He told me he was doing a project for an art class where he had to take pictures of the bottom of people’s feet. I had flip flops on, so I thought what the hell. He was behind me with his cell phone camera (which should have been my first clue). He raised my foot up, and he just started kissing the bottom of it. Needless to say, I was totally creeped out.
22. An elderly man in a wheel chair rolled by me, stopped, and appeared to be reaching down to get an item off the bottom self. I noticed that he could not bend down because I could see no items being removed. I tapped him on the shoulder to offer my assistance. Upon doing so, he jolted upright in a shock. Suddenly, urine was being sprayed all over me. It turned out the man was looking down, changing his catheter, not reaching for an item. Panicking, I stumbled backwards, then proceeded to slip on the urine, falling, and fracturing my pelvis. What a day that was.
23. I was walking through the bathroom section of a large department store, with all the different display bathrooms, when all of a sudden a voice says “Don’t you know how to knock?”. I had to do a double take to confirm what I was seeing, but there was a guy sitting on one of the display toilets, reading a newspaper and taking a shit. I told him he should have locked the door, and he looked genuinely furious about it for a few seconds before calmly going back to his newspaper. I moved slowly away, walking backwards, and left him to it.
– kimmyjay