To responsible adults, few things are more stressful than seeing kids in a dangerous or expensive situation.

When they’re not yours, there often isn’t all that much you can do.

This employee knew she had to care more than the parents, though, if for no other reason than saving their inventory.

Check it out.

Want to let your children run around a store? Now you can be as worried as the workers are.

This happened years ago while I was working at a craft store.

Like in most craft stores, there were walls of glass, ceramic and other very breakable very sharp items 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 kids and let them loose to play tag/Marco polo in the aisles while she shopped.

Here’s where she sets them straight.

After I had collided twice with these kids because they weren’t watching where they were going I decided to hunt 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 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.

It worked like a charm.

I spoke into my work headset without actually pressing the button:

“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.”

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 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.

Here is what folks are saying.

Good! That’s so dangerous.

It baffles me, too. I know Emergency Room doctors see kids from a lot of preventable accidents.

That poor woman. I hope she recovered.

That makes ME nervous. I can’t imagine what it puts the servers through!

Hatred is a strong word. But yes. Some people shouldn’t have kids.

Well, someone needs to control them!

At least mom had some sense left.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.