A Target worker allegedly told a shopper ‘I don’t think we sell these’ while she held banana chips she’d grabbed from a full display
She had to do all that for banana chips?!
A shopper trying to check out a bag of banana chips at Target was allegedly told by an employee that the store did not carry the product at all. The exchange took place after the self-checkout scanner repeatedly rejected the barcode.
Content creator Liz (@extracrispyliz) shared a reenactment of the exchange in a TikTok video. While ringing up items at a self-checkout kiosk, she tried to scan a bag of banana chips, only for the terminal to keep flashing an “invalid barcode” message.
When an employee stepped in to help, his handheld scanner reportedly produced the same error. He then questioned where she got the item and suggested the store did not stock it. The transaction was only resolved after Liz directed him to the display on the sales floor.
A bag of banana chips turned into a standoff
In her video, Liz walked viewers through the exchange, noting that she called the employee over after multiple failed attempts to scan the item. “Pretend these are banana chips, okay? Beep. Invalid barcode. Beep. Invalid barcode,” she demonstrated. The employee then tried scanning the item himself, with the same result.
“And he just stares at me, and I just stare at him,” Liz recalled. “And then he goes, ‘It’s not scanning.’ I go, ‘I know. That’s why I called you over.’ And he was like, ‘Where did you get these?’” Liz explained that she grabbed the bag from a fully stocked display near the produce section, but the employee wasn’t convinced.
“He’s like looking at it on his little scanner, and he goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t think we sell these,’” Liz recounted. She was baffled. “What do you mean you don’t sell them? You obviously sell them; they’re out on the floor, and there’s not just one. It’s not just like one little straggler; there’s like a whole section for them!”
Once Liz gave him directions to the shelf, the employee reportedly walked over, confirmed the banana chips were on the floor, and returned to finish the transaction. The employee’s side of the exchange isn’t available, as the account comes only from Liz’s video.
Why a product on the shelf can still be ‘not on file’
Self-checkout glitches are a frequent point of friction in busy stores, and they can arise from both scanning difficulties and gaps in a retailer’s product database. Research by ECR Retail Loss distinguishes between barcodes that can’t be read because of physical factors and barcodes that scan successfully but return an “item not on file” error.
The latter can happen when the product or its price is missing from the store’s system, for example when an item is newly introduced, discontinued, or not part of a particular store’s assortment. Checkout systems can get prices wrong in the other direction too, as one shopper found with a Walmart shirt that overcharged her. When a barcode isn’t recognized, employees can use handheld devices connected to the store’s inventory system to look into it.
Point-of-sale systems such as Oracle’s Xstore also include alternate ways to add items, such as catalog lookup and manual SKU entry, so a sale can go through even when a barcode won’t scan.
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