A woman is going viral on TikTok after sharing something that seems too absurd to be true: You can return Dollar Tree items to T.J. Maxx.
Krista (@krista144), a beauty, lifestyle, and shopping content creator, said she was recently stopping at T.J. Maxx when she stumbled upon an item that looked familiar. That item, she said, was a $5 vase Krista had recently purchased from Dollar Tree.
Notably, there was a stark price difference. While she said the vase cost $5 at the Dollar Tree, it was more than double that price at T.J. Maxx.
“It was priced $12.99,” Krista said of the T.J. Maxx vase. This led her to suspect that someone returned their Dollar Tree item to T.J. Maxx.
“Is this a new thing people are doing? Returning Dollar Tree things to T.J. Maxx?” Krista asked in the caption of her clip. As of Wednesday, her video had amassed more than 37,000 views.
Is this a real thing?
Apparently so. In the r/TJMaxx subreddit, another shopper lamented that they found a Dollar Tree bottle of leave-in conditioner at T.J. Maxx. While it’s unclear how much the bottle of product cost at Dollar Tree, it was priced at $10.99 at T.J. Maxx.
Commenters on Reddit made it sound like this was a common phenomenon. And they had a name for this practice too: a fraud return.
“Can’t stand when people do [this],” one Redditor wrote.
But how did this become so widespread?
According to another Redditor, some T.J. Maxx employees know that customers are returning products to the wrong store. They just don’t care enough to do anything about it.
“First of all, somebody has to bother to scan it. If the person taking the return is not suspicious that it’s mislabeled, then they wouldn’t bother to look it up,” one Redditor claimed. “I didn’t know that was a dollar store brand so I might not realize there’s anything suspicious about it. Second, the description it gives when you scan it can be kind of vague so sometimes it’s hard to tell even with a description.”
Last year, another T.J. Maxx customer said she similarly found a Dollar Tree item at the wrong store. In her case, the item in question was a facial serum that T.J. Maxx sold for $39.99. Notably, she said she bought the same product from Dollar Tree for a much cheaper price of $1.25.
Viewers say this is a widespread issue
In the comments section of Krista’s post, several users said that T.J. Maxx isn’t the only store to receive discarded returns from customers. Even so, they said T.J. Maxx receives a lot of returns from Dollar Tree, in particular.
“I showed a T.J. Maxx manager the Brazilian body mist spray the Dollar Tree sells and T.J. Maxx had it for $8.50,” one woman shared. “They kept it on the shelf after I told them it was from the Dollar Tree.”
“People do this everywhere, sadly,” another said. “I worked at T.J. Maxx and people did it there. Now I work at Target and people do it there as well.”
“Yeah, people do that,” a third viewer echoed.
At least one person, meanwhile, asked Krista how she knew the vase was a Dollar Tree product and not a T.J. Maxx one.
@krista144 Is this a new thing people are doing? Returning dollar tree things to Tj Maxx😩 #tjmaxx #dollartree #shopwithme #tjmaxxfinds #returns #scam ♬ Tweaker – GELO
“I can tell by the sticker residue on the bottom,” she responded.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Krista via TikTok comment, as well as to T.J. Maxx’s parent company, TJX, via email.
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