Comedian Goes Viral for Hilariously Spot-On TikTok Series Detailing the Horrors of Working Retail

Scott Seiss has been sharing a series of TikTok clips focused on the stupid things retail customers say to beleaguered employees on a daily basis.

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If you’ve never had to endure the uniquely torturous hell of retail work, consider yourself lucky. One could even argue that every person should be subjected to at least one year of retail hell so they could move through life with a baseline understanding of how unfathomably deep such a hell can go, thus treating future retail hell inhabitants with an informed kindness, but that’s another discussion for another day.

Unless your timeline is trash, you’ve certainly seen comedian Scott Seiss’ ongoing series of TikTok videos in which—with a hilariously specific attention to detail—he riffs on many of the phrases and general behavioral practices of the swath of customers who seemingly fail to grasp how a store operates.

Included among the array of annoying customer comments to which Seiss offers the sort of retort all employees have imagined giving in real life are “You should open up more registers,” “I can’t believe they have you working on Thanksgiving,” “The customer is always right,” “It didn’t scan? Must be free,” “Do you work here,” and many more.

In one clip, Seiss delivers a line that’s a confirmed instaclassic: “You’re not infallible, Susan, you’re at the mall.”

And while the set-up here is more generally retail-based, it’s not hard to spot the more specific IKEA connections. Seiss hadn’t responded to Complex’s request for comment at the time of this article’s publication, but he did offer a bit of insight in a recent chat with Audra Schroeder for Daily Dot. As Seiss explained, the IKEA greenscreen element is a nod to his own three years spent working at an IKEA in Baltimore.

At the time, he would do improv and make stand-up appearances when not on the clock. Seiss said he was “over the moon” about the co-signs his videos have gotten from other comedians, noting “I lost my mind” when LeBron James shared one of the clips.

Let this all serve as a hilarious reminder of what the average retail employee is going through on any given day. And, please, don’t be a dick and/or a Karen. Hell is hot enough as it is.

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