No Justice Staff Member, My Kid Doesn’t ‘Need’ That

Justice.

The store full of neon crap, cheap in quality but not always in price, clothing. The store that gives me hives when I think about going, and most-recently, the store that our eight-year-old has become obsessed with ever since she discovered she can get something camoflauge printed and bedazzled, in the same outfit.

We visited recently to get masks for a spa party, and another time to get a sequinned shirt that she just had to have because it was the hip-thing and who am I to deny her the it-shirt. Maybe a little because all I wanted in my young life was a Club Monaco sweatshirt, and I didn’t get it. So, from time to time, I’ll fit in a trip somewhere like Justice even though it kills me a little on the inside.

We’ve been to the store quite a bit, over the past year.

And I hate it, every single time. 

Every  time we enter the store, there are senior staff members in the store – I’m talking Moms-that-could-be-bordering-on-grandmas, read: they should know better than to harass the shit out of a Mom who just wants to get in and get out with the one thing that she came for.

“Oh honey, do you need a Mermaid tail towel?”

“We just got in these new jackets, they would be perfect for fall. You need it to go with that dress you’ve picked!”

“Oh, look at these dresses. You need this dress for the summer!”

“Here’s a necklace that goes with the sequins shirt – it would look fantastic on you”

I’m all for help when we go to a store. Hell, I’m the one who usually walks into the store and gets a ridiculous amount of prompting and help choosing items from the store. However, these comments weren’t directed at me, the one with the wallet, but they were directed at the seven and eight year old kids who take the whole ‘you need this’ to the next level, and you’re making me look like an asshole when I’m explaining ‘no, you don’t need it’.

Maybe just maybe, Justice sales person, you need a bit of a lesson in ‘needs’ and how not to be a horrible person when I bring my kid into the store. And I get that it’s your job, it’s your job to sell the gaudy things to kids – I really do but there’s a line. If I’m rolling my eyes in your general direction and I’ve turned down your ‘helpful picks’ three times and we’ve been in the store for five minutes, maybe just STFU?

There’s a different between need and want – and every single staff member at Justice is undermining that teaching, every time we walk into the store. The up-selling directly to the kid, the disregard to the parent in the store (or the grandparent who noted the same thing when she took a newly turned eight-year-old birthday shopping) makes me wrinkle up my nose and want to cringe every time the kid requests to go to Justice to shop. The selling-tactics make me cringe almost as much as the gaudy, bedazzled, poor quality, bad-washing clothes that the kid comes home with.

There hasn’t been a time that we’ve gone to the store, and this hasn’t been the case. It begs the question, Are all sales team members at Justice trained to be the most horrible person in the world?