Retail work can be tough, but it’s even worse when people refuse to pull their weight.

So, what would you do if your overnight coworkers constantly left their tasks unfinished, dumping the workload on you? Would you take one for the team and do their work? Or would you hatch a plan to show them how it feels?

In the following story, one retail crew finds themselves in this very predicament and opts for the latter. Here’s how it went down.

Too lazy to do your jobs, well then, take care of the boxes

This was during my time I was working in retail. Every day, my department would get pallets of merchandise that needed to be stocked, which would usually happen after my coworkers and I would leave for the day, just before closing (I would work closing one week, opening shift the following week, and weekends off).

During that time, we would have several groups of overnight coworkers assigned to different departments to stock merchandise brought in on the delivery trucks. Then, we would put any overstock in the back and clean up the cardboard boxes.

The opening shift would take care of any overstock pallets the overnights didn’t have time to get to. Every week, each group of overnight employees would be rotated to different departments. Unfortunately, there was one group of overnight employees that had a bit of a reputation for being lazy, and those guys were assigned to my department for the week.

When they got to work, nothing had been done.

At the time when this happened, I was working my opening shift (years before COVID), the wrongs being done during the week wasn’t so much being done to just me, it was being done to my other coworkers in my entire department. (So this was pretty much a group effort)

One day, my coworkers and I got to our department to find 4 pallets of merchandise, saran-wrapped, labeled as overstock. We double-checked the pallets and the shelves and found out that it needed to be worked. We were mad. By then, the department manager and supervisor found out, and they were livid.

So we ended up working the merchandise, putting them on the shelves, and I was getting ready to start breaking down the boxes when I got this wicked idea. My idea was to stack all of the empty boxes like they were full, wrap them up, and label them as overstock, but I wanted to get approval from my supervisor first.

The supervisor thought it was funny and approved the plan.

When I talked to my supervisor, I mentioned what I wanted to do, and my supervisor chuckled at the idea, approved it.

Then, he explained what had happened to him last year (apparently a year before, the overnight employees played a prank on him, on April 1st, they had left 2 pallets of “merchandise” wrapped up and labeled as overstock, he said he double checked, only to find out that all of the boxes on the pallets were empty)

So, he gathered all of us in the department, explained what we were doing, and we got to work.

The night crew learned nothing and ended up getting fired.

The supervisor explained that if it should happen again, we should inform him, work the merchandise, restock the empty boxes as if they are full, wrap them, label them as overstock, and leave the pallets for the overnighters.

Unfortunately, my opening coworkers and I, were done for the day, we were at 2 pallets, fortunately, our closing coworkers were there, when the supervisor explained what he wanted done. The next day, we walked in with more pallets of overstock merchandise. The supervisor was informed, basically, to rinse and repeat for the rest of the week.

The last day of the week however, we walk in, to our surprise, there was only one pallet, it had 7 pallets stacked on top of it, with a hand written “go **** yourselves” label on it. We informed the supervisor, he informed us that the overnight group assigned to our department, were terminated by the store manager.

Wow! Lazy people are the worst.

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit relate to this situation.

This is very true.

Agree! The story was hard to follow.

According to this person, working retail is something no one should have to do.

Sounds like this person understands it a little bit.

The night crew got what they deserved. If you’re not going to do your job, you deserve to be fired – every time!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.