Working in retail can oftentimes be a mundane experience filled with repetitive tasks that aren’t exactly exciting. This is something that a Lowe’s employee and TikToker named Chris (@ludichrispeed) captured in a viral post that’s accrued over 1.1 million views as of Saturday.
In the clip, he shows himself manually preparing a bunch of bricks for a customer, and viewers who saw his video were hit with flashbacks of their own experiences working in retail.
@ludichrispeed just another day in the workforce #work #forklift #timelapse #viral #thecranberries ♬ Sunday – The Cranberries
“Just another day in the workforce,” Chris writes in a caption for his viral TikTok which features a sped-up recording session of him manually placing 170 bricks, one by one, by hand, onto a flatbed cart from a shelf.
He explains why he’s performing the task in this manner in a text overlay of the video, which reads, “When someone orders 170 bricks and ur not forklift certified.”
Around halfway through the video, he grabs what looks like a radio and he exits the area. Another overlay reads that someone needed mulch, and he went to go and help them with that before returning to the bricks to continue to load them back onto the cart.
During his “mulch break,” a customer comes to the flatbed with a young child and is about to push the cart away, thinking that the Lowe’s employee was done loading all of the bricks. However, when Chris returns he explains that there are still more bricks to be moved, and he then begins working in unison with the customer to load them all up onto the cart before they finally complete the task.
The worker’s post sparked a litany of reactions. One commenter, who related to this task, stated that it’s indicative of the type of work many Lowe’s employees have to undertake.
“A true lowes struggle,” they wrote.
“As the kid of 1 former and 1 current lowes employee, this is all i remember from walking around outside and garden,” another person remarked.
However, another person said that although they weren’t officially forklift certified, they were still able to use the vehicle while at their job, but were simply told to ride it around the parking lot for an hour or so to get the hang of it.
“Didn’t take a single test to use the forklift,” the viewer claimed. “Just told me to drive around the yard for am hour to get used to it.”
Another person humble-bragged about getting their forklift certification, writing, “Couldn’t be me (I literally just passed my forklift certification test and hour ago).”
One TikTok user couldn’t understand why management just wouldn’t give him a pallet jack, which sounds like it could’ve definitely been a solution, as a single brick typically weighs anywhere from 4.3 – 4.5 lbs, resulting in a total payload of around 765lbs. However, it could be that the manual pallet jacks they had on hand couldn’t reach the height of the shelf, or the weight, at that height, may’ve caused the jack to topple over, and the safer bet was to manually put them on the flatbed cart by hand.
This seems like a fair assumption judging by a user who commented that there were too many bricks in the customer’s request to be moved by forklift.
“Doesn’t even matter there was still to much on the pallet to use a forklift u would’ve just had to do it by hand,” they wrote.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Lowe’s via email and Chris via TikTok comment.
