A Costco customer on TikTok recounted a strange experience she went through while on a shopping trip. Another person in the store “stole” her cart and used it as her own after she briefly left it unattended.
Author Jeneva Rose (@jenevaroseauthor) says what made the situation all the more bizarre was that her cart was actually full of items at the time. Unwilling to let someone just nab her stuff, Rose decided to take action. She said she hunted down the cart thief to get her stuff back.
Rose recorded her video from the inside of a Costco location. “I’m in Costco right now, and I left my cart somewhere because I couldn’t get it. I come back, and it was gone. Missing,” she starts.
“Do you know what I did? I went and found it. Some woman took it. I literally hunted her down, and I was like, ‘She couldn’t have gotten far. This place is packed.’ She took it over to the samples area, and she was eating a sample, and I just came up behind her, and I took it right back.”
A man accompanying Rose on the shopping trip, asked, “Who is it?”
The TikToker replied that she didn’t know who it was.
“And it’s not like it was an empty cart, like, literally, I picked out everything in here,” Rose says.
She shows some of the groceries and items she intended on purchasing, including some produce, a couple of bottles of wine, toilet paper, and the viral Costco-branded sweater that people either seem to love or hate.
@jenevaroseauthor There will be no Costco cart thievery on my watch, because I will steal it back. I am the Costco cart crusader 🛒🤺 #jenevarose #costcohaul #costcotiktok #storytime #reaction #chaoticenergy ♬ original sound – Jeneva Rose
Rose didn’t seem too keen on the idea of someone nabbing the shopping cart she took time to carefully compile. “She almost stole my Costco sweater. Now you know if you’re really good at shopping at Costco, and you pick out some bomb stuff, don’t leave it out. Someone will steal it,” she warns.
“Like she needed a Costco sweater, tomatoes, salmon, toilet paper. She was like, ‘Screw it this is mine.’ So let it be known if you steal my cart, I will steal it back,” she vows at the end of her clip, putting out a warning to any potential Costco cart thieves.
Commenters seemed tickled pink by Rose’s story, with TikToker @artistformerlychelsea writing, “I would have loved to see the look on her face.”
Another said they couldn’t believe the gall of the shopper to take a full cart. “Omg I get nervous to take an empty cart in the store bc I’m afraid someone’s using it but a full cart?!” user @aparks23 questioned.
“Plot twist, she DID grab everthing that you had and you stole her cart! lol,” @crystaldonaldson1 quipped.
According to another TikToker, @basic_book, it would seem that cart mix-ups are a bit more common than one may assume. “I did once accidentally take someone else’s cart instead of my own. realized it two aisles later and everyone was reunited,” they shared.
Rose isn’t the first person to hop on social media to complain about having their entire cart swooped out from under their nose when they least expected it. This Redditor said that while frequenting a Safeway location, and trying to grab some items off the top of a shelf, they had to leave their full cart unattended. After coming back to their cart, it was gone.
What made the situation all the more frustrating was that the Reddit user in question was an Instacart shopper who had three customers waiting on them to fulfill an order. “I couldn’t believe it.. I was shopping for 3 customers and one of them was rushing me during the whole process. Ended up 30 mins later than expected Just wonder why he/ she did that,” they wrote.
As the blogger Ron Tanner, who had his shopping cart taken at Trader Joe’s, pointed out, sometimes these cart thefts are honest mistakes. He described an instance in which a woman mistook his cart for her own, and she was extremely apologetic.
However, Tanner said that he’s also come across “scavengers” who will take the items out of his unattended cart and haphazardly toss them on a shelf so that they could use his cart to complete their own shopping.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Costco via email and Rose via Instagram direct message for comment.
