Alexa (@alexan.fernandez), a first-time pregnant boy mom and TikToker, took to her account to share a distressing incident she says she experienced at Target, when she was treated like a “common criminal” for trying to test strollers.
Alexa described how she and her friend had gone to a Target, where an employee helped them test strollers by “untying” the strollers on display so they could test them out. The strollers, according to the 7-month-pregnant Alexa, are all fully assembled and on display, but are fastened with zip ties, which prevent shoppers from actually using or testing them.
The employees at Target, however, were helpful to the new mom-to-be and removed the zip ties for her to test them.
“That way we could test the strollers, like how to close them up, how heavy they are, how to put in the bassinets, and all the things, all the things that you should know before you make $1,000 purchase,” Alexa explained.
Alexa added that she was specifically looking for a Mockingbird stroller — which starts at $549 — so she went to a second Target location to locate it. However, when she tried to find an employee to untie the zip ties again for her to test the strollers there, she had a much different experience.
Instead of being helpful, the Target employee refused to untie the strollers and acted, in Alexa’s words, “snippy and rude.”
The Target employee, Alexa said, then sent an asset manager over who accused her of trying to steal the strollers.
Alexa had her husband with her at the time, and although he tried to explain that they were, not in fact, trying ot steal the strollers, but simply wanted to test a few features of the strollers, the Target employees refused to listen and then escalated the situation even further by accusing Alexa and her husband of untying some of the strollers that were not fastened down.
The couple quickly refuted the claim that they had untied the strollers, but Alexa says that at that point, the employees then threatened to have the expectant parents escorted out of the store.
“He’s like, ‘Well, you can’t even touch them, like you can’t do anything with them, or we’re gonna have you escorted off the premises,’ like common criminals,” Alexa described. “And I was like, ‘Okay, what? Like, we’re not doing anything wrong. You said you could help us, or we’re not being helped. We’re just here looking at the strollers, like, can we not even touch them?”
“He was like, ‘No, you can’t,'” she added.
By this point, Alexa said she had started to get 'emotional' at how she was being treated.
Eventually, Alexa says that three Target employees, including two store associates and an asset manager, were involved and accused Alexa and her husband of “breaking the rules,” insisting that they needed to leave the store, threatening to call the police and even ban the couple permanently from visiting Target stores ever again.
“My husband’s basically like, ‘What do you think? My seven-month-old pregnant wife is gonna just run out of here with a stroller?'” The influencer recalls.
The employees continued to insist that the couple needed to “leave the premises” because they were “breaking rules,” but could not explain what rules the couple had broken after Alexa asked.
“I’m being treated like a criminal for looking at a stroller for my child,” she described in her video.
Alexa went on to file a formal complaint with Target corporate, who confirmed that she should have been allowed to test the stroller displays.
In a follow-up video, she says that eventually, Target offered her a $75 credit for a stroller, but she explained that a free stroller wasn’t what she was after.
She said “there were still a lot of issues” she had with the situation and how she was treated, including the fact that Target failed to contact her after her initial complaint was sent in, that the “issue was not really resolved” of parents not being allowed to test strollers, and the store’s attempt to send her a stroller credit felt “like a way to brush everything off.”
After she relayed that to the Target powers that be, she did receive a response she says she felt was “more appropriate” and “addressing their concerns,” with corproate promisng to look into the issue of parents being allowed to test the strollers.
In all of her videos, Alexa summed up her experience, saying her “goal” in sharing her story was never to get a free stroller, but simply to be treated with respect and have the store address the issue of parents being allowed to test the strollers on display before purchasing.
“Ultimately, I have to say, I’m really disappointed,” she said in her original video. “It just feels like so many things escalated so quickly and for no reason, to the point where my husband is fuming and I’m crying walking out of a Target, and all we wanted to do was test the stroller. That was it.”
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