Some parents treat public places like their personal playgrounds.

This woman, who was working in a craft store, noticed a mom was letting her kids run around the store and play tag.

She collided with them 2 times, so she decided she had to do something about it.

She came up with a clever workaround to subtly tell the mother she needed to watch her kids.

Read the story below for all the details.

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 most craft stores, there were walls of glass and ceramic and other very breakable, very sharp items for sale.

And this day, I was stocking one of these fragile sections.

This woman noticed a mom with 4 kids entered the store.

A woman came in with what felt like 10+ children under 15.

But it turned out to only be 4 kids.

And she let them loose to play tag and Marco Polo in the aisles while she shopped.

She collided with the kids, so she decided to look for their mom.

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.

She didn’t want to ask her directly, so she came up with a plan.

I had worked enough customer service to know something.

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.

She pretended to talk to another employee on her headset.

I stood in the same aisle as her and pretended to be stocking something near her.

Then, 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.”

So, the mom gathered all her kids and told them to just stay with her.

Suddenly, the lady realized there might actually be danger as she has been letting her young children sprint around a store.

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.

Wow! That’s genius. Let’s see how others reacted to this story on Reddit.

This user shares their personal thoughts.

Well played, says this person.

This person shares an unfortunate incident.

Here’s another petty idea from this person.

Finally, short and sweet.

Sometimes, you have to scare the parents before they do anything about their kids.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.