33 ‘I Can’t Make This Up’ Stories From the Pits of Retail Hell

Whether you’re cursed with back-to-back opening and closing shifts, cleaning up absolutely trashed bathroom stalls or thwarting the kind of “Extreme Couponing” shoppers once thought to be a myth of early aughts reality television, working retail sucks. 

But as some particularly unlucky employees can attest, those low points are actually the high points of retail hell. Just ask the Redditor who watched a seemingly sloshed manager emulate Mike Tyson’s most infamous moment during an office party gone wrong. “Working at a sports bar/restaurant there was a little office party going on and the boss ended up biting an employee’s earlobe off,” they recalled of their gruesome shift. “We found the earlobe outside the next day, earring still in it and gave it to the police.”

Other Redditors have shared the retail horror stories they still have nightmares about, and a shocking number of them involve biohazards.