Sometimes, a prank can end up going way too far, leaving those watching it arguing over whether or not they just saw someone make a lighthearted gag on an unsuspecting individual or are simply watching harassment take place in real-time.
The joke a TikToker named Shazzy (@shazzyycakes) pulled on a Target employee, thankfully, is the former kind of prank. Shazzy documented it in a viral video that viewers are thoroughly enjoying.
In it, Shazzy inquires about a return, and, when he’s asked for a receipt, he hands over a hand-drawn one, prompting an interaction with the employee throngs of viewers are smitten with.
The video begins with Shazzy walking up to the Target customer service counter, and he approaches an employee behind the register. A text overlay reveals the gag he’s about to set up: “Drawing my own receipt prank! It actually worked lmao.”
“Uhhh, I’d just like to return this,” the TikToker says to the woman, who then asks him for his receipt or the card it was presumably purchased with.
He hands her the drawing of the receipt, which he superimposes on the video via a green box. She sees it and chuckles to herself.
“What’s wrong with that?” he asks her.
“This?” she replies.
The Target employee looks back down at the hand-drawn receipt and explains, “It’s just not an actual receipt.”
@shazzyycakes Lmao she wanted to keep it at the end too 😂😂 #prank #foru ♬ original sound – Shazzy
“That’s what they gave me,” he tells her.
“Who gave this to you?” she asks, incredulous.
“The cashier—like they ran out of paper, and they just drew that,” he tells her.
The worker doesn’t question him at all, taking his story at face value. “Oh, I’ve never seen that before,” she says. The clip then cuts to her examining the receipt further, and Shazzy continues to tell her the story of how he ended up with the drawn receipt.
“Yeah I thought it was a bit peculiar, but, like, I don’t know if that’s what you guys do now. … I mean, if you run out of paper, what else can you really do you know? So I didn’t judge, you know?” the TikToker tells her.
“Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. This definitely proves you bought it with the debit card,” she says, looking at the paper. She ultimately processes his return and hands him an actual receipt from the register’s receipt printer.
Viewers praised the worker’s positive attitude. “Wow … she deserves a gold star… she was taught the olden rules for customer service,” one said.
“If the ‘customer is always right’ was a person,” another joked.
Others feared that the worker would face disciplinary action as a result of her decision to process the return with a receipt that was drawn in pencil on lined notebook paper. “You bouta get that lady written up,” one user warned.
And while a drawn receipt, complete with an asymmetrical Target logo may look bizarre, it did seem like Shazzy included all of the necessary and requisite information on the self-made bill of sale that a traditionally printed receipt would carry. And, according to in-depth discussions on this Quora forum page and Oboloo, there are many instances in which receipts containing the correct information about the purchase date, time, item description, quantity, pricing, tax, and payment method details—a receipt like Shazzy’s—could be considered entirely valid for bringing goods back to a store for a refund. Plus, there’s the fact that the Target employee in question noted how the TikToker marked down the correct debit card payment, suggesting that she could’ve looked up transaction history in her system and saw that the details he put on the drawn receipt tracked with what she was looking at on her end.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Target via email and Shazzy via TikTok comment for further information.
