Man starts working at Target. Then they demote him for being ‘too friendly’

People love to hate on managers. Especially in retail, feedback from management can range from unfathomable to outwardly hostile.

One former Target employee shared his experience with one such opaque performance review, and the fallout that followed only got stranger from there.

‘I was too friendly and didn't know how to lead'

Content creator Grant Hilde (@ghilde) shared a story from his time working at Target as a teenager. His video has since accumulated more than 930,000 views.

“I was 19, I worked at Target as a supervisor,” Hilde began. “But after six months, they told me I was too friendly and didn't know how to lead. So they demoted me to a cashier.”

Hilde said that very same week, the employee who handled the store's cash room “and counted all the money” quit. Target offered Hilde a deal: if he learned the cash room duties, they'd keep his pay at his supervisor rate.

“I was like, [expletive] it,” Hilde said. “I'll give it a try. They trained me six separate times and then asked me if I was good to go. And I was like … I got it.”

However, it seems Hilde did not in fact get it. He went in to count the store's cash for the first time the day after Black Friday, and “realized [he] had absolutely no idea what [he] was doing.” He finished the count anyway, and that's where he found a glaring error.

“I looked at the computer, and it said we were missing $31,000 cash,” Hilde said. “I walked out of the cash room, and my boss looked at me and she goes, ‘How'd it go?' And I put my hands up and I go, ‘Pat me down.' We had to review the cameras to make sure that I wasn't like, shoving cash in my [expletive].”

When Hilde returned home that evening, Target had “removed all [his] cash room shifts … They just kept all [his] cashier ones.”

Can Target legally demote someone for being ‘too friendly'?

Legally, Target did nothing wrong regarding Hilde's employment status. Most U.S. employment, including at Target, operates under “at-will” employment law. This means employers can generally demote or reassign workers for almost any reason, or even no stated reason at all. As long as nothing discriminatory or retaliatory goes down, employers are usually in the clear.

As Super Lawyers explains, employers are free to demote workers over performance concerns. Subjective critiques like “too friendly” or “doesn't know how to lead” easily fall under that umbrella, however vague they might feel to the employee on the receiving end.

TheStreet reported this year that Target rolled out a company-wide push “to encourage more friendly interactions between store employees and shoppers.” This change reportedly backfired, with the policy “[making] some shoppers uncomfortable.” This policy did not specifically address intra-team management styles. Anonymous Target employee reviews on Indeed do, however, describe a broader pattern of employees feeling blamed for management's decisions.

Buzz News has reached out to Hilde and Target via email.