Most people know the frustrating experience of going grocery shopping, only to realize that nothing is where you expected it to be.
In a viral TikTok, retail worker Tammy Lynn Turley (@tammylynnturley) exposed how the big box stores can rearrange everything overnight. The answer is deceptively obvious: Instead of taking everything off the shelves and moving the products around, workers just move the shelves themselves.
The TikTok appears to be taken inside of a Walmart, as indicated by the signage in the background of the video. It shows a team of people pushing a giant shelf across the store to a new location, and it clearly blew a lot of people’s minds. In less than three weeks, the video attracted more than 7 million views.
@tammylynnturley It was here the last I shopped! #DisneyPlusVoices #groceryshopping #foryoupage #fyp #work #pushit ♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey
The comment section is full of people freaking out about this new discovery, chiming in with comments like, “POV shook watching this cause your whole life you thought those were bolted to the floor,” and “Not me thinking they individually rearranged all the items.”
Other commenters complained about the inconvenience of these large-scale rearrangements: “The rage that I experienced when my favorite grocery store moved everything around is something indescribable.”
This kind of store-wide makeover is part of an ongoing psychological battle between retail managers and their customers. Customers typically want to finish their shopping as fast and efficiently as possible. Meanwhile the store owners want customers to stick around, buying as many products as possible—preferably expensive ones. By rearranging the shelves, the stores can keep customers slightly confused, forcing them to walk past more shelves and hopefully buy things they didn’t plan on buying.
Judging by the comments on this video, pretty much everyone hates this strategy—including the people who work in these stores. “I hated doing this, management never knew where they wanted the isles [sic],” wrote one commenter.
“I just KNOW this was done in the middle of the night by a bunch of sleep deprived employees,” another said.
But most of the TikTok’s viewers were stuck on the moving shelves.
“Idk how I thought they rearranged stores but this was not it,” a viewer wrote.
The Daily Dot has reached out to @tammylynnturley via TikTok comment.
Correction: A previous version of this post identified the location as a grocery store. The video appears to have taken place at a Walmart.
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