Wish kids would stop opening stuff in shops

[notedbiscuits]

It annoys me when kids - both when I worked in retail and when I am visiting shops - touch, muck about and play with stuff that they (or their parent(s)) going to buy.

I have seen kids opening the blind boxes and bags - think Lego figures, Pokémon.

Play with footballs

Then have seen evidence of multi packs opened with a bag of crisps taken. Sometimes it’s the parent that opened the multi pack and pay for the item as their DC was screaming and giving a bag of Quavers just to keep them quiet.

Look but don’t touch

Parents need to step up and parent their children.

Is it common?

Never allowed ours and they have never asked to. I don't see it in shops around us.

I think blind bags are an abomination. I can see why parents open them because their child wants a specific one and they've already chuffed £800 on them and 100 have gone straight to landfill.

If all toys had no packaging it would be a lot better.

I also can't get mad with a child playing with a football. It's not a museum.

No idea what a blind bag is.
I have never seen what the OP described

You often see it in supermarkets too where the kids open up crisps and open them as they walk/ride around in the trolley. But lots of MNers think it's entirely acceptable. so what can you do?

It's a plastic/foil bag or plastic box/ball/egg usually that has a toy inside. They often have layers of accessories for the toy inside so after it's been opened there is a small landfill sized pile of plastic wrapping and a crap toy.

They're usually part of a series. So it could be the teenage mutant ninja turtles. Your child desperately wants donatello and has already had 10 Raphaels because you can't see inside to see which toy it is.

I refuse to buy them. When pestered I sometimes buy the contents second hand without all the packaging!

As for playing football, it's easy for the entitled parent to say it's fine. No doubt if the ball hits a display and knocks it over, they won't be helping to put it back together again.

I used to get really irritated when I had to work Saturdays in a library and the yummy mummies would bring their young kids in who proceeded to pull all the books off the shelves and leave them over the floor and of course it was the staff who had to pick them up.

It's not something I've ever done myself but what's wrong with them having a pack of crisps from a multipack that they're going to buy anyway?

I saw a child press holes in as many Easter eggs as they could. Stopped when I just stared at him. Parents oblivious.

My aunt was quite snotty about my tots eating something from the trolley I was paying for anyway, but I remember hers were kept quiet with a soother or a bottle of fruit juice. Some prefer to use a screen. IMO opening a packet of cheese triangles is the lesser evil.

The worst for me is the TK maxx makeup, but adults are at it too! It's just too bad most things are a one off and there aren't testers you just have to chance it sometimes.

Never seen this behaviour.

But all of what you describe here is poor parenting.

No point in listing a them and then picking one like it's somehow better.

Kids don't need to be taught to boredom/comfort eat because their parents are doing something they find boring.

If you are buying the product eg giving a toddler a biscuit in the trolley I do understand that it may be the lesser evil (though not something I ever did, pay first in my book) but any form of damage should be paid for re kids handling goods and the surprise type things should be paid for too but I wouldn’t be allowing them to collect in the first place

My kid sometimes has a drink or something to eat and we pay for it at the end, he’s diabetic and goes low and its what we do to save his life. Long as people pay for it this is a completely nonissue.

I always told my kids "we don't own it until we have paid for it" and for some reason that actually stuck with them unlike many of the other things I told them!

At 16 when I worked in a shop I was completely gobsmacked to see parents giving them food from the shop before they had paid. My mum would never have done that, and although I'm not with her on a lot of things, this one I am.

It would make me feel like a shoplifter. The only exception I have ever made to the eating in a shop rule was one Christmas when a shop assistant gave my toddler a doughnut in Tesco.

If parents are paying I don't see the issue.

If they are opening things and then leaving it or stealing some of it, that is different.

I worked in M&S one Christmas and was shocked that grown adults were snacking on food and having the cashiers scan the empty wrappers at the check out. Absolutely bonkers.

BUT THE MOST BONKERS was a woman had seen a box of macarons on the shelf, thought they didn’t look very good (hello? It’s a bloody supermarket not a patisserie!) taken them off the shelf, opened the box, eaten one of each flavour and then had the audacity to bring them to customer service and say she hadn’t liked them and they weren’t proper macarons like she was used to. My manager misunderstood and thought she had bought them and was returning them and offered her a refund! She had the humility to look a little embarrassed explaining she had no receipt but was about to accept store credit when I delicately repeated what had happened to the manager, who was so bamboozled by her actions he hadn’t understood the first time.

Do you not keep something on you for this purpose, rather than take something off the shelf? DH is diabetic and always has something for a low.

If you’re going to pay for the multipack of crisps, or drink, then fine. Not fine if you take out a bag or a can and put the rest back.

DD loves blind boxes but would never dream of opening them in the shop. Almost every place we go to have damaged boxes and already opened things so YANBU at all. Just lazy parents with their feral children.

They are basically gambling, which is illegal for children, but the (previous) government refused to categorise either real or virtual blind bags as gambling (I have a friend who works in this area).

If they actually pay for them. I used to work in a supermarket and the amount of eaten or half eaten stuff left littering the shelves was amazing. A lot of the stuff wasn't from a multi pack so the consumer had no intention of paying right from the get go.

I worked in a fairly small rural supermarket and this was rife!

Kids would come in in groups, wander around, and then one would cover for another who would open a multipack of crisps or - even worse, multipacks of something they weren't even going to consume like dogfood and take the indivddual tins and put them in the freezer, the fridge, behind the fresh fruit...

They often do it because they are bored and they think it's funny. If we'd been able to afford for one worker to sit and watch the CCTV we might have been able to stop them, but not a hope - everyone had to be on the shop floor.