The Matt Walsh Show - November 14, 2025


I Have A DISTURBING Update About Target

Topics
Target employee demands customer service quality collapse
Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Matt Walsh Show Twitter Adrian Costanzo Desjardins Bloomberg Godspeed Trump
Ep. 1691 - The SNAP Scam Is Back, An Ice Age Is Supposedly Coming, & A Gold's Gym Controvery Update Matt's HOTTEST Takes From New Show ＂Friendly Fire＂

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

171.79

Word count

1,707

Sentence count

136

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Target makes disturbing demands of staff in a bid to boost flagging sales. 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 on their employees. I don t like that.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:01:10.540 Target makes disturbing demand of staff in a bid to boost flagging sales.
00:01:15.740 Another reason to shop elsewhere.
00:01:18.160 Disturbing demands.
00:01:19.220 That sounds scary, doesn't it?
00:01:23.700 If you shop at Target at all,
00:01:26.220 you probably want to know as a customer that they're making disturbing demands of their employees.
00:01:33.880 I don't like that.
00:01:34.960 If I was shopping at a place, I didn't really shop at Target.
00:01:37.760 But if I did, I wouldn't want to shop there and approve of that.
00:01:41.600 You're making disturbing demands.
00:01:44.280 So let's read on.
00:01:45.480 Let's find out what these disturbing demands are.
00:01:47.180 I mean, the mind, you conjure all kinds of possibilities of what these demands could be.
00:01:52.800 Well, reading on,
00:01:55.180 Tis the season to be jolly, especially if you work at Target.
00:01:57.980 The retailer wants employees to keep their spirits bright and their smiles tighter as the holiday rush hits full speed.
00:02:04.440 Indeed, Target has imposed new rules on employees in an effort to spark some festive cheer up and down the superstore's aisles.
00:02:13.140 Employees were told that if a shopper comes within 10 feet of them, they must smile.
00:02:17.080 If they come closer within four feet, employees must ask whether they need help or how their day is going.
00:02:22.860 Heading into the holiday, we're making adjustments and implementing new ways to increase connection during the most important time of year.
00:02:28.400 Chief Stores Officer Adrian Costanzo told Bloomberg,
00:02:32.300 The guidance is part of a Target, Target's new initiative, internally dubbed the 10-4 program, to make its stores more welcoming.
00:02:38.820 While Target has always encouraged workers to be outgoing in kind, it has never mandated this before.
00:02:43.800 Response to the news online has been critical.
00:02:46.640 Nothing boosts morale like a mandatory happiness.
00:02:49.660 Next update, employees must giggle when scanning items.
00:02:52.640 Another wrote, they did just fire a ton of employees and now they want them to smile about it.
00:02:58.020 One ex-user said, it's a recession indicator.
00:03:01.240 And another said, this just gives me another reason to shop elsewhere.
00:03:04.160 And then someone else said it was disturbing.
00:03:05.860 So this is what people are upset about.
00:03:07.540 So the disturbing demand is that the employees must be nice to the customers.
00:03:13.640 That's the disturbing demand.
00:03:16.180 The disturbing demand is that they smile and say hi to the customers who come in the door.
00:03:22.560 So disturbing.
00:03:25.140 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?
00:03:34.400 You want me to do the, the, the, it's like not even doing anything.
00:03:41.880 You just want, you want the smallest possible effort from me?
00:03:46.660 You mean, you mean you want me to refrain from making the customers feel actively unwelcome when they walk into the store?
00:03:57.040 That's what you want.
00:03:57.880 Oh, that's disturbing.
00:03:59.940 I'm disturbed by that.
00:04:03.580 Bare minimum.
00:04:06.180 That's so disturbing.
00:04:08.220 No one's ever asked me to do anything at all before.
00:04:10.680 You're saying that there's like the slightest obligation at all that comes with this job?
00:04:16.460 So disturbing.
00:04:18.720 To state the obvious, this should already be the policy.
00:04:22.340 It used to be back when I worked customer service jobs 20 years ago or so ago.
00:04:26.980 The policy everywhere was that you had to greet customers and ask them if they need any help.
00:04:33.080 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.
00:04:49.820 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?
00:05:06.260 Like you could, you could go into the average Target, Walmart, any place, and you could walk around for like an hour and you, there will be no communication or acknowledgement from any employee at all.
00:05:17.820 Except maybe they sneer at you, like they don't even want you there.
00:05:21.860 Now, there are caveats.
00:05:23.680 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.
00:05:32.760 Fair enough.
00:05:33.720 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.
00:05:41.780 Most people on earth actually are not Matt Walsh.
00:05:44.620 So I think this is like a general experience.
00:05:46.900 I think most people have experienced this.
00:05:48.520 We've talked about before the decline of customer service.
00:05:51.580 It's a very real thing.
00:05:52.960 Everyone has noticed it.
00:05:55.560 Customer service is awful almost everywhere except for Chick-fil-A, anywhere outside of that.
00:06:01.480 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.
00:06:07.380 But everywhere else you go, the customer service is God awful.
00:06:10.820 It's not just that there's no service.
00:06:13.620 It's that they actually make you feel bad for being there.
00:06:16.000 You feel guilty for even walking in the door.
00:06:19.820 And, but yeah, there is that.
00:06:22.200 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,
00:06:30.460 and someone did ask me, I would still say, no, I'm good.
00:06:35.080 And then I would walk around and wander aimlessly for another 45 minutes.
00:06:38.660 But still, I think that this should be standard.
00:06:45.400 And it used to be.
00:06:46.960 And now it's considered a burden.
00:06:49.940 Disturbing.
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00:07:46.760 So there is certainly a major decline in the quality of work that's done in this country,
00:07:51.980 and you can see it even in these low-level customer service jobs, especially in those jobs.
00:07:57.720 You see it everywhere.
00:08:00.180 You know, I mean, we've had occasion to hire contractors many times over the past few years for different projects,
00:08:05.280 and we found some good ones, but also a lot of just shockingly bad and shoddy work.
00:08:10.660 So it's all over the place.
00:08:12.560 So to bring it back to what we talked about yesterday, when Trump talks about the fact
00:08:15.680 that we don't have all of the kind of talented, skilled people we need.
00:08:19.540 H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration,
00:08:23.500 because if you want to raise wages for American workers,
00:08:25.840 you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.
00:08:30.100 I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.
00:08:32.840 We have plenty of talented people here.
00:08:34.240 No, you don't.
00:08:34.860 No, you don't.
00:08:35.260 We don't have talented people here.
00:08:36.660 You know, you don't have certain talents, and people have to learn.
00:08:40.760 What he's pointing to is not entirely wrong, and we all know that.
00:08:44.740 We all talk about that.
00:08:46.120 Just when you go around in the country, it feels like the work being done is really bad a lot of the times.
00:08:52.140 So we all notice that.
00:08:54.900 There's been a collapse of standards in this country.
00:08:57.680 There's no doubt about it.
00:09:00.840 And it's so bad now that when you hire someone to work customer service
00:09:04.300 and you expect them to smile, it's considered some kind of onerous demand upon them.
00:09:09.960 But where Trump is wrong is in the prescription.
00:09:12.540 So we're not going to solve the problem by bringing in foreigners with H-1Bs. 1.00
00:09:16.380 We're not going to solve the problem with mass migration. 0.67
00:09:18.380 We're not going to solve the problem with illegal immigration. 0.99
00:09:20.460 In fact, that's part of what's causing the problem with the collapse of standards,
00:09:23.300 particularly when it comes to contractors and that sort of thing.
00:09:28.000 No, you need to train up our own people.
00:09:29.700 As I said, raise the standards in this country among our own people and for our own people.
00:09:38.260 That's how you solve it.
00:09:39.480 You don't solve it by bringing in cheap labor that's oftentimes even worse in every respect
00:09:46.620 than what we already have here.
00:09:48.640 If you'd like to see what else I have to say, you can access my full show by going to dailywire.com
00:09:52.560 or by going to the Matt Walsh Show Twitter page.
00:09:55.060 Hope to see you there.
00:09:55.820 Godspeed.