“Two Marines say Target store booted them for recruiting”:
Two Marines in their dress uniforms – the ones with white hats, khaki shirts and blue trousers with red stripe – say they were accused of recruiting at a Target department store here and told to leave.
“We weren’t recruiting,” according to Cpl. Carlos Rodriguez, 22, who said he returned in October from his second combat tour in Iraq. “I just popped in to say hi to a guy I went to high school with. He works there.”
But an assistant manager who saw Rodriguez and the other Marine apparently thought otherwise and showed them the door, according to both servicemen.
Manager Brian Sherman, who was not in the Chesapeake South store Monday when the alleged incident happened, denied Friday that the Marines were ordered out. But he said he was told they were talking to employees.
Target has a strict “no solicitation” policy—which may have confused the assistant manager. And to be fair, I’m sure he would have acted in exactly the same way had he, say, seen a gaggle of nuns talking to a store employee in the lingerie aisle.
Because it’s clear that once one puts on a uniform, one is by default acting on behalf of it—utterly unable to separate professional duty from quotidian concerns.
Just ask the assistant manager. Seems his little red vest compelled him act like a petty tyrant fattened on his own tiny slice of worldly power.
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(h/t Iowa Voice, who posts his own thoughts here)
Now come on, be sensible. If you saw that assistant manager at Camp Pendleton in his red vest, you’d just know he was trying to sell cheap consumer electronics to the leathernecks, wouldn’t you?
Although, wearing a vest with that design on it, at a military base, might not be the smartest thing to do.
As one who loves the Corps and Le Boutique Tarzhay, this breaks my heart.
It makes me cry when Mommy and Daddy fight.
Hey! Target is just being consistent. They don’t allow the Salvation Army on the premises, why should they allow the Marines?
Another good reason not to shop at Target.
If the venue had been anywhere but Target, I might have written this off as a tempest in a teapot; the store manager’s version had it that one of the Marines was bullshittng with an old high school buddy who works at the store, on company time, and was asked to desist. However, having noticed how many Target (and WalMart, and BestBuy) employees seem to spend most of their shifts standing around bullshitting, and also noting that Target doesn’t have much of a “military-friendly” corporate rep, I kinda think the uniforms had something to do with the officious little twit asking them to leave.
hey! Target kicks out the Mary Kay ladies too…but then, that’s usually because they ARE soliciting in the makeup aisle..
okay, where was I going with that? *scratching head*
oh yeah – the thing is, in order to get kicked out of Target for pimping your Mary Kay wares, another Target shopper has to complain.
The managers are usually nowhere to be found on the store floor.
And Squid made me LOL.
Disgusting.
In all the years I spent working for someone else, “assistant manager” ALWAYS equaled “petty tyrant”.
tw: years66 Well, not quite that many…
I do like the strong denial by the manager….who was not there at the time… huh?
As tone deaf as Target was about the Salvation Army bell-ringers, I jhope they get out front of this one. Uncomfortably enough, I own some of their stock, and like to shop there too.
Nothing on the Target corporate website “newroom” as far as a statement, etc. Bah.
I totally thought that said cheap cosmetics at first, and I was about to climb on my soapbox about how you were ruining my life, diminishing my achievements, etc. ad nauseum.
Then I realized that would be silly.
Semper Fi.
According to the rule then, they must throw out muslim women wearing head scarves or sheets or any muslim man with beard and skull cap.
BECAUSE OF THE CONSISTENCY!!!111ONE!!!!
Only the highest quality cosmetics for those guys with the necks like leather.
Especially moisturizer. Lots and lots of moisturizer.
The number of outraged new ex-customers may (but won’t) be greater than the number of new or renewed Target shoppers who, as in the Salvation Army case, are thankful to them for taking out the trash, but the latter are the demographic Target has chosen to court, and the former the one it’s disdaining as a part of that effort, so any discussion of this story works to that end.
Nice sentence.
What I mean is, your outrage can only make you self-removing trash. That’s what they want from you. You’re trapped.
Well done, Target.
Not me, BoZ. I like to go to Target just to walk up and down for a couple of hours, then finally decide I don’t see anything I want to buy.
I would like to think, if I witnessed this sorry slice of Americana, within three seconds I would be in that managers face.
Lord help the person I see spitting on a soldier.
These guys are trained warriors, protecting us all from foreign enemys, yet in this situation, dealing with unpleasant civilians while in uniform, they are helpless. That’s when an average citizen can, in a small way, return a service.
If this bullshit gets out of control, like after Vietnam, there’s going to be a lot of dented Priuses driving around here.
Jim in KC—I never saw a Marine wearing cheap comsetics.
Years ago in Ventura Calif, a woman named Shari Dally was kidnapped from the parking lot of the local Target store by her husband’s paramour and murdered. While still missing, a security manager of Target loaned equipment to volunteers searching for her and was fired by Target for doing so.
You can guess how much I shop there.
The assistant manager has got to be the world’s biggest idiot. Chespeake is in an area of Virginia that is overrun with military bases and installations, without trying I can think of 8. There are huge numbers of servicemen and huge numbers of civil service employees who depend on the military for their jobs. The normal operating procedure in most places is to treat the military well if you wish to thrive.
Yeah, but that Target store manager was right! You neo-cons wingnuts would love to see Walmart kneecaping nuns in the parking lot! There are 1200 Targets in the country and 99.9999999999% of them have indoor plumbing!