It's yet another busy evening shift at the Store. I'm running the grocery floor, but I have to cover the front end so the front end supervisor can take her lunch break. I'm at the podium monitoring the lines when I hear some raised voices suddenly escalate above the volume of the background chatter. I look around and by checkstand 11, I see the source of the fracas - there's a man and a woman with their stuff on the belt, and two other women with a cart full of stuff behind them, and the two groups are trading words. It starts getting louder and I can hear profanity being exchanged, and, since the senior management is gone for the day, I make my way over and try to diplomatically address the situation.
ME: Is everything OK over here?
One of the women in the second group: No it isn't! Her husband is a cheater! That bitch-ass... (suddenly everything gets drowned out by four people pointing and shouting at each other)
As far as we were able to discern later on, the ladies in the second group were accusing the man of cheating on his wife (the woman with him) with some friend of theirs, and this simply would not stand - he had to be called out there and then in the grocery store. I hate when people bring their personal drama into the Store - it's not our role to take sides and I have no interest in adjudicating anyone's private life. I step in between the two groups and try to shout that they need to calm down and deal with this elsewhere, and wave to a clerk who sees what's going on. He takes the ladies' cart and tells them to follow him so he can check them out on the other end of the store, and they agree and follow him.
Crisis averted, I think to myself. Just seconds later the front end supervisor gets back from her break. I fill her in on what just happened and point out the two parties involved to her, and she says she'll keep an eye on them. I start to make my way to the customer service desk to deal with some other business when our fragile armistice is broken - out of the corner of my eye I see the two women running back from the lane they were escorted to, the cashier who was trying to help them following behind, as they run up to the lane the couple was in, start yelling again, and then all hell breaks loose.
All of the sudden one of the women is choking the wife, the man socks the woman choking her in the face, and suddenly everyone is screaming and cans are getting thrown in the air. I call on my headset for Mr. Wayne (our in-house security team) to get out to the checkstand ASAP. The cashier (who just got out of the military and is an amateur MMA fighter on the side) jumps in to try and break things up, and Mr. Wayne rush out to intervene too. Other customers are staring and recording on their cell phones. (The footage is probably on YouTube already.) I yell for the customer service clerk to call the cops while the Waynes are grabbing the women and pulling them away, with one of them attempting to climb up onto the conveyor belt and run at the man in order to get around them. One of the women pulled a knife on the cashier at one point, but he twisted her wrist and she dropped it after which he kicked it to the side.
Ultimately, Wayne and the cashier manage to get everyone separated, and the man and his wife pay for their groceries. I ask the couple if they want to stick around and file a police report. They decline, and we can't force them to stay, so they gather up their stuff and are headed outside when the women chase them again, shouting threats and cursing at them. At this point it's myself, two other supervisors, both Mr. Waynes, and the rent-a-cop who patrols our parking lot forming a wall between them and the couple's car to stop them from trying to attack the car as it drove away.
Eventually, the police showed up and took statements from all of us, got copies of the surveillance video, and they and Wayne handled the aftermath of the situation between them. I don't know if any arrests were made, but the cops ended up being there for about 4 hours after the fight itself broke out (though they were possibly delayed by the auto accident that happened in our lot shortly thereafter, or the paranoid homeless man who was asking people to buy him a knife, but those are tales for another time.)
We just kind of spent the rest of the night shaking our heads at the whole scenario. Time and place, people. A crowded grocery store is not the appropriate venue in which to air your personal grievances about another person's sexual hygiene. I don't care who's right or who's wrong, who slept with who's man, who's two-timing who, it's no excuse for that kind of public freakout, let alone to start it up again twice after being de-escalated. There's hundreds of people in this store who don't care about your drama and just want to shop without your causing a scene and slowing everything down. (It took us an hour to finally deal with the lines that got backed up when everything stopped.) Save it for Jerry Springer.
Yeesh.
ME: Is everything OK over here?
One of the women in the second group: No it isn't! Her husband is a cheater! That bitch-ass... (suddenly everything gets drowned out by four people pointing and shouting at each other)
As far as we were able to discern later on, the ladies in the second group were accusing the man of cheating on his wife (the woman with him) with some friend of theirs, and this simply would not stand - he had to be called out there and then in the grocery store. I hate when people bring their personal drama into the Store - it's not our role to take sides and I have no interest in adjudicating anyone's private life. I step in between the two groups and try to shout that they need to calm down and deal with this elsewhere, and wave to a clerk who sees what's going on. He takes the ladies' cart and tells them to follow him so he can check them out on the other end of the store, and they agree and follow him.
Crisis averted, I think to myself. Just seconds later the front end supervisor gets back from her break. I fill her in on what just happened and point out the two parties involved to her, and she says she'll keep an eye on them. I start to make my way to the customer service desk to deal with some other business when our fragile armistice is broken - out of the corner of my eye I see the two women running back from the lane they were escorted to, the cashier who was trying to help them following behind, as they run up to the lane the couple was in, start yelling again, and then all hell breaks loose.
All of the sudden one of the women is choking the wife, the man socks the woman choking her in the face, and suddenly everyone is screaming and cans are getting thrown in the air. I call on my headset for Mr. Wayne (our in-house security team) to get out to the checkstand ASAP. The cashier (who just got out of the military and is an amateur MMA fighter on the side) jumps in to try and break things up, and Mr. Wayne rush out to intervene too. Other customers are staring and recording on their cell phones. (The footage is probably on YouTube already.) I yell for the customer service clerk to call the cops while the Waynes are grabbing the women and pulling them away, with one of them attempting to climb up onto the conveyor belt and run at the man in order to get around them. One of the women pulled a knife on the cashier at one point, but he twisted her wrist and she dropped it after which he kicked it to the side.
Ultimately, Wayne and the cashier manage to get everyone separated, and the man and his wife pay for their groceries. I ask the couple if they want to stick around and file a police report. They decline, and we can't force them to stay, so they gather up their stuff and are headed outside when the women chase them again, shouting threats and cursing at them. At this point it's myself, two other supervisors, both Mr. Waynes, and the rent-a-cop who patrols our parking lot forming a wall between them and the couple's car to stop them from trying to attack the car as it drove away.
Eventually, the police showed up and took statements from all of us, got copies of the surveillance video, and they and Wayne handled the aftermath of the situation between them. I don't know if any arrests were made, but the cops ended up being there for about 4 hours after the fight itself broke out (though they were possibly delayed by the auto accident that happened in our lot shortly thereafter, or the paranoid homeless man who was asking people to buy him a knife, but those are tales for another time.)
We just kind of spent the rest of the night shaking our heads at the whole scenario. Time and place, people. A crowded grocery store is not the appropriate venue in which to air your personal grievances about another person's sexual hygiene. I don't care who's right or who's wrong, who slept with who's man, who's two-timing who, it's no excuse for that kind of public freakout, let alone to start it up again twice after being de-escalated. There's hundreds of people in this store who don't care about your drama and just want to shop without your causing a scene and slowing everything down. (It took us an hour to finally deal with the lines that got backed up when everything stopped.) Save it for Jerry Springer.
Yeesh.
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