Working retail can be really frustrating because often what is obvious to the employees is not obvious to the customers who often seem completely clueless.

Imagine working in a store where you’re unboxing a popular product to put on display.

Would you be surprised if a customer came up to you and asked where that product was located even though you were standing right next to it?

The person in this story has been in that exact situation.

Let’s read all the details.

People are unbelievably oblivious to their surroundings

I work at a big home improvement store on the US Gulf coast.

A few weeks ago we had a big winter storm come in, so I was putting out several boxes of pipe insulation, pipe wrap and faucet covers out on the main aisles (we always get tons of people looking to buy these whenever the weather drops below freezing).

We put giant endcaps out, right in front of the checkout lanes.

We had so many boxes taking up practically the whole front of the store.

The customers clearly weren’t paying attention.

But I still had so many customers walk right in, come right up to me, and ask “Where is the piping insulation… do you guys have faucet covers?? ” etc..

I’m literally standing like 5 feet away from, with a box cutter, opening all these boxes for display.

I was wondering if maybe it’s because our faucet covers are colored weird (so maybe people didn’t recognize them), but we also had big signs on the boxes, and the pipe insulation and everything else looked normal and was in plain sight.

It was far from just one person who asked.

And people kept asking over and over.

It took all my self-control to not say something snarky.

Eventually, after like 20 people doing this – completely blind to their surroundings – I really start to worry about the future of civilization. Crazy.

From a customer’s perspective, I can somewhat understand this.

To the employee, it was obvious, but if the customer is unfamiliar with the store, or even more likely, familiar with the store, they may think it’s easier to ask for help then look for themselves.

In this case, the products were also moved to end caps at the front of the store, so it’s possible that customers went to look wherever the products are usually on display and couldn’t find them.

That said, I could see how it could be really frustrating to have customers ask the same question over and over again all day when the answer seems terribly obvious.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Here’s another story about oblivious customers.

This woman’s boyfriend is the type of person to ask employees before even trying to look on his own.

Another person doesn’t understand this perspective.

Here’s a story about oblivious customers at a fabric store.

Customers are really unaware of their surroundings.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.