- Front-line retail workers face a variety of workplace hazards both inside and outside their stores.
- Employees at Walmart and Target told Insider about risks they experience while on the job.
Retail jobs may not be the most dangerous out there, but the hazards store employees face are widespread.
In the past few months, a 27-year-old Walmart employee died after being struck by a vehicle in a store parking lot in Colorado, a Target worker was stabbed in Chicago, and a Lowe's worker was pinned under a box in Louisiana.
"There are a lot of dangerous aspects to working retail," said a Walmart employee of eight years who works at a store in Minnesota. "Hell, even some of the customers are dangerous. It's not the most dangerous job in America, but it's moving up the list."
In a statement to Insider, Walmart said, "The safety of our customers, suppliers, and associates is a top priority. We take a comprehensive approach to maintaining health, safety, and security."
A Target spokesperson referred Insider to the company's 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance filing, which says, "We continue to prioritize safety in support of our commitment to being 'the safest place to work and shop.'"
Both Walmart and Target have strong safety records, but the companies are bellwethers for the wider retail industry, with a combined 2 million employees working across about 6,400 US stores.
Insider spoke to a dozen current and former Walmart and Target employees nationwide to understand the dangers that retail workers face on the job.
The employees requested anonymity because they were concerned about professional repercussions and because they are not authorized to speak to the media. Insider has verified their identities.
Retail workers describe 'near misses' with unbalanced boxes and badly packed freight
Many workers told Insider the backroom is often a place of potential danger. They said that short deadlines and low staffing levels make it difficult to unload inventory from freight trucks and store it safely.
"Sometimes we compromise our own safety to try to get all this stuff in the store," said a Target worker in Texas, adding that there have been several "near misses" in which boxes have fallen over near workers, though nobody has been hurt.
The worker also said it's not unusual for his store to receive a truck that is dangerously packed, with heavy pallets of water or milk stacked on top of unsteady pallets of paper towels or pet food.
"Think if you gave a kindergartner a task to pick up a bunch of Lego bricks and just stuff them in a box, that's exactly what the trailers look like from the distribution centers," he said.
And after trucks are unloaded, there are sometimes so many pallets of inventory placed around the backroom that "you can't move around," according to a Walmart employee from Iowa.
Store workers have been threatened with guns
On the store floor, shoplifters and customers wielding guns make some employees particularly nervous.
The number of assaults in retail establishments has been increasing at a faster pace than the national average, according to a New York Times analysis of FBI data.
Three Walmart employees and a former Target executive team lead told Insider about incidents with customers wielding guns.
"I had a gun pulled on me because I refused to sell a customer a demo display of a Bluetooth speaker," a Walmart employee from Michigan said. The employee and his manager were able to de-escalate the situation and escort the customer out of the store, he said.
Robert Roselle was working at a Target in Nevada one evening when shoplifters loaded up a cart full of liquor and headed out the door, where they were met by a security guard.
The shoplifter "pulled up his shirt and showed that he had a weapon, so the security guard backed off," Roselle said. "We're not here to be a hero for alcohol."
Company policy bars most Target employees from attempting to interfere with shoplifters — including brazen "push-out" robberies in which carts of merchandise are wheeled out to a getaway car.
Between January 2020 and November 2022, Walmarts nationwide saw 363 incidents of gun violence and 112 deaths as a result, per Guns Down America, a nonprofit gun-safety group. To be sure, Walmart has the most stores in the US, with roughly 4,700 locations, and supermarkets in general have long been a target of gun violence.
Retail workers say reckless drivers pose a threat in parking lots
The hazards of retail work extend beyond the store's front doors.
"About five years ago a pregnant manager was on her phone in her car in broad daylight," a Walmart employee in Illinois said. "Someone got in the car behind her with a gun. They took her car."
The employee also said there have been shootings in the parking lot of her store, but more often, the dangers of the parking lot are posed by inattentive or impatient drivers. A few months ago, a team lead was run over by a car and suffered a broken leg, the Illinois employee said.
"We get people all the time that come and turn the parking lot into their own race course," the Walmart employee from Minnesota said.
A Target team lead in Florida said cars frequently drive too fast and disregard signage in the parking lot, while the Minnesota Target worker said he spent some time on a quiet day counting how many drivers came to a complete stop at a stop sign near the front door.
"Forty percent just blew right through the stop signs," he said.
The Texas Target worker said the company started requiring high-visibility vests after workers at other stores in the state were hit by cars.
"It doesn't always stop people, especially people who are texting," the Texas worker added.
If you are a Walmart or Target employee who would like to share your perspective, please reach out to Dominick Reuter at dreuter@insider.com and Ben Tobin at btobin@insider.com.