The Matt Walsh Show - I Have A DISTURBING Update About Target

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

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Target makes disturbing demand of staff in a bid to boost flagging sales. Another reason to shop elsewhere. Disturbing demands. That sounds scary, doesn't it? If you shop at Target at all, you probably want to know as a customer that they're making disturbing demands of their employees. I don't like that. If I was shopping at a place, I don't really shop at Target.

But if I did, I wouldn't want to shop there and approve of that. You're making disturbing demands. So let's read on. Let's find out what these disturbing demands are. I mean, the mind, you conjure all kinds of possibilities of what these demands could be. Well, reading on, tis the season to be jolly, especially if you work at Target. The retailer wants employees to keep their spirits bright and their smiles tighter as the holiday rush hits full speed. Indeed, Target has imposed new rules on employees in an effort to spark some festive cheer up and down the superstores aisles.

Employees were told that if a shopper comes within 10 feet of them, they must smile. If they come closer within four feet, employees must ask whether they need help or how their day is going. Heading into the holiday, we're making adjustments and implementing new ways to increase connection during the most important time of year. Chief stores officer Adrian Costanzo told Bloomberg. The guidance is part of a Target's new initiative, internally dubbed the 10-4 program, to make its stores more welcoming. While Target has always encouraged workers to be outgoing and kind, it has never mandated this before. Response to the news online has been critical. Nothing boosts morale like a mandatory happiness.

Next update, employees must giggle when scanning items. Another wrote, they did just fire a ton of employees, and now they want them to smile about it. One X user said it's a recession indicator, and another said, this just gives me another reason to shop elsewhere. And then someone else said it was disturbing. So this is what people are upset about. So the disturbing demand is that the employees must be nice to the customers. That's the disturbing demand. The disturbing demand is that they smile and say hi to the customers who come in the door.

So disturbing. I mean, that is, that is, so you, you mean, if I'm an employee of Target, you want me to do the bare minimum of my job? You want me to do the absolute bare minimum? You want me to do the, it's like, not even doing anything. You just want, you want the smallest possible effort from me. You mean, you want me to refrain from making the customers feel, actively unwelcome when they walk into the store. That's what you want.

Oh, that's disturbing. I'm disturbed by that. Bare minimum? That's so disturbing. No one's ever asked me to do anything at all before. You're saying that there's like the slightest obligation at all that comes with this job? So disturbing. To state the obvious, this should already be the policy.

It used to be back when I worked customer service jobs, 20 years or so ago, the policy everywhere was that you had to greet customers and ask them if they need any help. And if you didn't do that or if you didn't smile, and as you can imagine, for me, this was, I didn't take to this very well. But you were corrected because this was, this was the job. And now I go into these places. I walk around and any of these like retail places, not greeted by any employees. Nobody asks if you need help finding anything, right? Like you could go into the average target Walmart and any of the place.

And you could walk around for like an hour and you, there will be no communication or acknowledgement from any employee at all. Except maybe they sneer at you, like they don't even want you there. Now, there are caveats. First of all, I know when I say this, you might say, well, you know, you're Matt Walsh, and they're not nice to you because you're Matt Walsh and they hate you. Fair enough, that might be the case sometimes, but I think this is the general experience of everyone, even the people who are not Matt Walsh, which is, frankly, most people. Most people on Earth, actually, are not Matt Walsh.

So I think this is like a general experience. I think most people have experienced this. We've talked about before the decline of customer service. It's a very real thing. Everyone has noticed it. customer service is awful almost everywhere except for chick-fil-a anywhere anywhere outside of that and even some of the chick-fil-a's now i got to say it's even there even there they're like teetering a bit but everywhere else you go the customer service is god-awful it's not just that there's

no service is that they actually make you feel bad for being there you you feel guilty for even walking in the door and um but yeah there is that and also i will also admit that if I was walking around the store and I did need help finding something, which I often do, and someone did ask me, I would still say, no, I'm good. And then I would walk around and wander aimlessly for another 45 minutes. But still, I think that this should be standard. And it used to be. And now it's considered a burden.

Disturbing. The holidays will be here before you know it. and for many families, that means excitement and a little stress between gifts, travel, and higher prices. It's easy to feel overwhelmed, especially if you're already relying on credit cards to cover the basics. If you feel the debt is piling up, you're not alone. But there is help with American financing. If you're a homeowner, you might have considered reaching out to American financing, but hesitated because you don't want to give up your low mortgage rate.

That's why American financing created the smart equity loan, a simple and smart way to get your finances back on track without giving up your low mortgage rate. The smart equity loan offers a fixed rate, so you'll have one predictable monthly payment. Let's use your home's equity to pay off high-interest debt, free up your cash flow, and still keep your existing mortgage intact. There are no upfront fees to find out if you qualify, so call American Financing today. 866-5694711. It's 866-5694711, or visit Americanfinancing.net slash walsh. So there is certainly a major decline in the quality of work that's done in this country,

you can see it even in these low-level customer service jobs, especially in those jobs. You see it everywhere. I mean, we've had occasion to hire contractors many times over the past few years for different projects. And we found some good ones, but also a lot of just shockingly bad and shoddy work. So it's all over the place. So to bring it back to what we talked about yesterday, when Trump talks about the fact that we don't have all of the kind of talented, skilled people we need.

H-1B visa thing will not be a big private. for your administration, because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. But you also do have to bring in talent. Well, we have plenty of talented people here. No, you don't. No, you don't have talented people here. No, you don't have certain talents and people have to learn. What he's pointing to is not entirely wrong.

And we all know that. We all talk about that. Just when you go around in the country, it feels like the work being done is really bad a lot of the times. So we all notice that. There's been a collapse of standards in this country. There's no doubt about it. And it's so bad now that when you hire someone to work customer service and you expect them to smile, it's considered some kind of onerous demand upon them. But where Trump is wrong is in the prescription.

So we're not going to solve the problem by bringing in foreigners with H-1Bs. We're not going to solve the problem with mass migration. We're not going to solve the problem with illegal immigration. In fact, that's part of what's causing the problem. with the collapse of standards, particularly when it comes to contractors, and that sort of thing. No, you need to train up our own people. As I said, raise the standards in this country among our own people. And for our own people. That's how you solve it. You don't solve it by bringing in cheap labor. That's oftentimes even worse in every respect than what we already have here. If you like to see what else I have to say, you can access my full show by going to daily

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