Abbey is annoyed with a woman who works at the new Target store in Washington, D.C., because the woman lied to her and wasted her time:

One of my roommates just got a Wii, so I decided to go to Target and get “Wario Ware: Smooth Moves.”  Before hitting the store, though, I gave their electronics department a call to see if they had the game in stock.  A woman in electronics picked up the phone and when I asked her if she had the game, she quickly said, “Yeah, we’ve got that in stock.”  So I got up off my couch and walked over to the Target to buy my game.

When I got there, less than half an hour later, I checked the shelves – but no game.  I went to the front desk to see if someone could help me find it.  After a few minutes of being flirted with by his coworker (as a line steadily grew behind me), the guy at the electronics desk told me that in fact, no, they didn’t have the game in stock.

Now, I’d be willing to believe that maybe in the twenty minutes it took me to get to the Target, someone snatched up the last copy of Smooth Moves.  But then the guy at the desk (who was really helpful) said, point blank to me, “I don’t know who answered your call, but they obviously just didn’t feel like looking it up.  Sorry about that.”  (Side note: my guess is that the flirty coworker was the woman who answered my call; she was the only other person working in that department, and she beat a hasty retreat when she heard what I was looking for.)

So, basically, Washington DC’s shiny new Target is being staffed by people who would rather lie to potential customers than spend what turned out to be literally ten seconds to look something up on a computer.  What a wasted trip.

–Abbey

PS – I sent essentially this same message through Target’s contact form yesterday and got a standard “sorry, come again soon!” form letter.

You need to chill out, Abbey. It’s quite possible that the woman who answered the phone was a psychic in training, and she made a good faith effort to “see” the inventory without averting her gaze from her coworker’s butt while he ran the cash register. Or what if it’s Target Opposite Day and the employees are forced to reverse their answers? Managers love coming up with weird team-building exercises like that.

At any rate, just pretend that your trip to Target was a bonus Smooth Moves game—Nintendo’s pretty innovative, so maybe they’ve worked real life pointless tasks into the mini-game concept by now.

(Photo: Getty Images)

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