Looking up and over the rim of her glasses, she saw the man at the teller
who was causing such a stir. His voice wavered with self-important indignation
as he waved the toothbrush in the air, demanding to see the manager.
Tori knew she had to intervene before she was dealing with a full-blown
tantrum. But when she went to see what the man wanted, he called the police on her.
As the manager of a Target store in Swansea, Massachusetts,
Tori Perrotti thought she had seen it all. Dealing with rude and entitled customers on
a daily basis had taught her to handle difficult situations with diplomacy and sensitivity.
But she never expected all her years of working in retail to
teach her another surprising lesson about human behavior.
If Tori had learned anything from working in the service industry,
it was that customers would walk all over her if she let them. She had to be fair, but firm.
But never in all her years of working at Target had a customer made such an
outlandish and unreasonable demand — and then done everything in his power to ruin her life.
It all began when David Levitt, a self-proclaimed “award-winning journalist,” walked into Tori’s
store and made such an unbelievable scene that the cops had to become involved.
In fact, the outrageous clash between Tori and the entitled man would become a battle
of such epic proportions that Twitter users were soon scurrying to pick a side.
Now, David Levitt was obviously a man who was used to getting his way.
The notorious Twitter troll made his way through the aisles at Target
and spied an Oral B Pro 5000 electric toothbrush that had been used for display purposes.
Seeing the suspiciously low price on the demo model, he gleefully swooped in to purchase it.
Armed with limited knowledge of consumer protection law
and an overwhelming sense of entitlement,
David casually swanned up to the checkout counter and waited for the cashier to scan the barcode.
Call it penny-pinching or just looking to pick a fight, he was determined to get his way.
Only, Tori wasn’t going to stand for it.
The flustered cashier immediately knew what David was doing, but
she gently explained that the electric toothbrush was for demo purposes only.
She pointed out the capital lettering that clearly said “DISPLAY” above the price tag, which was set
(by default) at $.01. David huffed and puffed at the register, then he demanded to see the manager.
Enter Tori, who had been watching the man for the last five minutes.
She could see that the situation was escalating at an alarming rate.
Nevertheless, she was confident that she could handle it.
But, unfortunately, she underestimated how far David was willing to go to get his way.
Tori approached him and tried to reason with him, but then he whipped out his phone.
Another man would have accepted Tori’s response, but not David.
When she flatly refused to be bullied, his face went from an
expression of indignant to defiance as he pulled out what he thought was an ace up his sleeve.
He shoved his phone in her face, took a picture,
and uploaded it for his 210,000 followers on Twitter to see.
When Tori responded by rolling her eyes, it incensed David even more. In a blatant
display to show her the extent of his power, he called the police on her. To make matters worse,
he was sure to document the situation as it unfolded with live tweets on his Twitter account.
Little did he know, it was all about to backfire on him spectacularly.
Underneath the photo of the unflappable retail worker, David angrily typed the caption:
‘this @target manager Tori is not honoring the price of their items per Massachusetts law.’
But when he saw that his intimidation and public shaming tactics weren’t working,
he decided to try a different tactic. Not fifteen minutes later,
he posted another smug update that had the Twitterverse rallying.
‘I just had to call the police because @target refused to sell me the toothbrush,’ David wrote
obnoxiously. He obviously expected his fans to feel sympathy for him.
What he didn’t anticipate was the tweetstorm that followed.
In an amazing show of instant karma,
his followers immediately began to roast him online. But the show wasn’t over yet.
Twitter users immediately jumped on the fact
that David was clearly wasting the police’s time with such a petty request.
David found himself scrambling to defend his actions, stating that he did ‘not call 911’
and had explained to the police that it ‘was not an emergency’ and they ‘could take their time.’
Eagle-eyed fans were also quick to point out that the law wasn’t on David’s side,
either. In a stunning turn of events, they began to back Tori.
One user retaliated with: ‘So, Let me get this straight.
You’re bothering the police because of an obvious mistake Target made
that you want to exploit? Because we all know those toothbrushes don’t sell for .01.
Then you went on Twitter and blasted the photo of a $15 per hour employee just doing their job?’
After David saw that his followers weren’t fooled, he tried the sympathy card one more time.
‘I have not been able to afford to go to a dentist in over three years,’ David
retorted. ‘So yes I wanted a good toothbrush and was thrilled to see such an amazing prize
on an @OralB but @target refused to honor it and now I have to take them to court.’
Well, the Twitterverse was about to see to it that that never happened.
‘How can you be an award-winning multimedia journalist and also be illiterate?’ another
user wrote scathingly, referring to the obviously incorrect price tag on the toothbrush. ‘It’s
for the display, not the item. Probably because that display is a spot on the shelf,
and has to have a tag on it because of the store’s internal system.’
Then, Twitter users turned their attention to Tori.
‘I want to go give this woman a hug,
one former retail worker to another,’ another user wrote. Then, someone had
an amazing idea that would turn the tables against the self-important “journalist.”
One woman was so sympathetic toward Tori’s
thankless occupation that she decided to open a GoFundMe account — pledging to
raise enough money to send the retail worker on a well-deserved holiday!
Tori, whose full name was unknown to the Twitterverse at the time, earned the nickname
#TargetTori. Soon, the internet was flooded with her story. Memes were made
of her now-famous eye-rolling photograph and local news stations clamored to interview her.
People were so enamored by the battle between the rude man and the blue-collar
worker that the donations began to pour in. But would they reach their target of $5,000?
Meanwhile, David Leavitt’s face also began to flood the internet. His appalling behavior had
earned him an unflattering meme of his own, referencing the ‘let me talk to your manager’
temper-tantrum-throwing people that retail workers have to deal with on a daily basis.
And, just a few days after the story went viral, the GoFundMe account had garnered over $35,000!
It wasn’t long before ‘Target Tori’ had been tracked down and the money that the GoFundMe
account had raised was released to her. She opened a Twitter account of her own under
her new moniker to express her gratitude to all the netizens who stood up for her.
She has since decided that instead of going on a holiday as originally
intended by the creators of the account, she will donate all the money to charity.