It’s a familiar scene—you walk into a retail franchise, get to the checkout, and the cashier asks if you would like to sign up for their store credit card. It’s almost unavoidable these days. But one TikToker is explaining to viewers why she’s had enough of this repetitive question when it comes to her local T.J. Maxx.
“What incentives are they possibly giving y’all to shove these credit cards up everybody’s a**?” user Hailey (@Colorist_haileyjoy) asks on TikTok after returning from the store earlier this month.
She explains that she lives across the street from a T.J. Maxx and goes in there frequently to browse. But she rarely makes purchases, because her thought process is that if she only likes one item, it’s not worth it to be “harassed” about a credit card she has told the same employees repeatedly she does not want.
“Now I have worked retail where the company has provided credit cards and we’ve had to do the whole thing,” she continues. “I know you guys can get in trouble for not asking and I think that’s completely unfair. I get it. The place I was working at, it was to the point that they were writing people up…for not getting enough credit cards.”
But just because you understand employees are likely under a mandate from corporate doesn’t make the experience any less annoying. And for Hailey, she says her “breaking point” actually came when dealing with a supervisor during her most recent trip to the store who just pushed too hard.
After declining to sign up for a credit card yet again, he asked if she would be using her TJX card to pay for her purchase—and she said no.
“And he goes, ‘Why not?’” she recalls. “And I said—and this was probably the rudest I’ve ever been—but I was like, ‘You know, seriously? I’m good.’ Because it’s every f*cking time I shop here.”
His response that pushed her over the edge? “And he goes… ‘Yeah, but you’re in here all the time,’” the TikToker says. “Guess what? I’m not coming back. This is why people rather shop online.”
Nobody seemed at all surprised by Hailey’s experience, and her comments section was mostly filled with retail employees expressing frustration at having to push store credit cards on customers or risk their jobs.
“Yeah at my store they used to cut hours if you didn’t get enough cards,” wrote one viewer. “They’re super pushy and the APR is astronomical.”
“Incentive is not firing you,” another added, while someone else said where she worked they would “get written up if we didn’t ask or get a certain amount everyday.”
“I worked at Marshall’s and they’d get mad if I didn’t push it on people even if they were only buying one item like socks. They also cut my hours majorly when I wasn’t getting any cards,” said one user.
@coloristhaileyjoy Yall getting $100 bonuses per card or what?? #tjmaxx #tjx #creditcards #creditcarddebt #shopping #tjmax #debt #shoppinghaul ♬ original sound – Colorist_haileyjoy
Other self-identified former retail employees mentioned punitive actions like having managers stand over them to make sure they were asking for cards, getting shamed in front of other employees if they didn’t hit a certain threshold, and having their yearly raise rely on whether they had pushed enough cards or not.
One person wrote that they received “absolutely nothing” as an incentive for bugging customers about signing up for a credit card: “The bosses get a bonus, we keep our jobs.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Hailey via TikTok comment.
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