The Raising of Children (or not)

Over the past few years of working in retail I have realized two things. First, the customer is more often then not wrong. Second, there are a lot of children out there who have been inadequately raised. I'm not saying I'm an amazing parent, because I'm not even a parent, but there are lines that need to be drawn.

The first thing that blows my mind is that parents bring their children to a store and then let them run wild as if all the employees are their own personal babysitters. I have seen children run down aisles, skate down aisles, drive scooters down aisles, bounce balls, throw balls at each other, throw balls over shelving units, the list goes on. There are a few recent events though that have me seriously wondering what parents are thinking.

The other day I was straightening an aisle and I hear a bunch of stuff fall over somewhere near me. I go around the corner and there is a small baby, yes baby, crawling along the bottom of the Maybelline section. She is pulling all the nail polish out of the unit and throwing it on the floor while her parents browse the DVD's. When her mother sees me she quickly runs to her baby and says she will clean it up. This child is not even a year old. I am not exaggerating. There is no excuse for letting a baby that small crawl around on a dirty store floor let alone the fact that she was trashing my section.

Then there was the incident of the children and the scooter. I had a customer come up to me and say that she was literally knocked over by a child riding a scooter down the aisles. So I grab my manager and he tells the little girl she needs to stop riding it. She is about 5 or 6 and she's with 2 boys about 7 to 9 years old. So I go back to doing my work and I look over and one of the little boys is now riding the scooter around. This has gone on for 10 minutes now and there is no parent in sight. So I go up and make the kids bring me to their parents. They bring me to their mother and I ask her to please take away the scooter because they are running over customers. She was completely across the store from where her children were acting up.

This third story is the one that takes the cake. There is a group of preteen/teen boys that come into our store. The first time they were noticed was when they bought some milk, went outside, tried to have one of them drink the whole gallon, and promptly vomitted all over the side walk. One of our stock boys had to go out and clean it. They have also stollen condoms on a couple different occasions. Their most recent incident was today. They were over by the Zippo lighter display being rowdy and I was keeping an eye on them. One of them asked me if they could buy a lighter and I said I didn't think they were allowed (we only sell lighters to adults). So then one of the larger boys decides he's going to start yelling at me. So I call over my manager because this little boy although larger than me is not larger than my practically 7 foot tall manager. They calm down once he gets there and I again tell them they can't buy the lighter. They complain as they're walking away about how Wal Mart apparently sells them Zippo lighters. About ten minutes later I realized one of my fragrance testers is gone...

I would never have dreamed of acting this way when I was a kid. I would have been in an amazing amount of trouble if I had treated any adult with the kind of disrespect that kids are showing nowadays. I for one am going to do everything I can to instill respect in my children. I would be horrified and humiliated if my children acted in the manner that so many I see act. I know I'm not going to be a perfect parent, no parent is, but I would hope that my children would at least not turn out to be like these.