momentarily, do you know wgat that word means?

Cuz it's in New Jersey!

Shoplifters, crazy shoppers, and people who need their beef jerky. NJ isn't the only place with Security in their stores. o_o

Eh, I dunno if it was a formal "security" guy. It was a warehouse store. They sent over a big guy in a special shirt to moderate things. If I hadn't been there with two small kids, we would have shrugged it off. But with the little ones around you start having thoughts like "so this kook is following us now? what if he decides to punch my kid?"

Legal issues I'm assuming. The husband might've gotten in trouble too if he did anything too serious. I'm sure he did step up but the FML doesn't give the full story either.

Warehouse stores have security-type people. They sell diamonds and TVs and generators and...uh...very expensive mass quantities of seafood. :) I'm happy to not have married the sorta man who would break a crazy old man's face in a store parking lot in front of my kids over a beef jerky-related incident ;) To share some more details... we were on our way to the check-out lines and the store was really crowded, so everyone was moving at a snail's pace and there wasn't any easy option for getting out of the guy's way. We were blocked on all sides, staying to the right, and the old man was trying to go against the flow of traffic, basically wanting to go directly into us. When he first started mumbling threats and waving his arms around, we were just confused. Like..."Hello, sir. We can't fly. I literally do not know how to get out of your way right now." Then he started yelling, and his wife started yelling, and he starts challenging us to "meet him outside". But the people to the side of us moved up and we headed up to the check-out line and figured that would be the end of it. Then Mr. Crazypants got behind us in line and started yelling and again challenging us to fight him in the parking lot. Naturally, the cashier was curious about why the old man in line was yelling and wanting to fight us. So we explained that there had been a previous incident by the beef jerky samples. The cashier waved a manager over (not at our request). The manager waved a security guy over. And they stated that the security guy would walk us out and that someone else would "detain" the old man to make sure that we got to our car without any further harassment. If our small children hadn't been in the cart, I would've shrugged it off and said that a security escort wasn't needed--because this entire thing was crazy and I wasn't really feeling in physical danger from the old man. However, I did have two small children in the cart and they were confused and nervous about what was happening. It was very nice of the store to intervene and make sure that the old dude didn't follow us out to our car. While I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have hurt us (and yes, my husband certainly could have knocked him to the ground if he tried--heck, I could've wiped the floor with the old man if necessary), we were more concerned that he would simply follow us out to our car and harass us while we tried to load our car--which would have frightened our kids. And yeah, if he did manage to seriously frighten our kids, one of us would have eventually either injured or at least gotten *really* nasty with the old man--which also wouldn't have been setting a great example for our children. So we were happy to go with the least disruptive and scene-causing option, which was happily offered by the store personnel. As I commented earlier, In my 30+ years of shopping in NJ, I've never encountered anything like this before and I hope to go another 30+ years without it occurring again. It was hella weird. I'm very happy that this store (which I go to often) handled the situation so well. On the way home, my kids were talking about it and were like "I'm glad that man helped us to our car and made that angry man stop following us!" and they don't seem to be too shaken up by the whole thing, so as much fun as it might have been to make the news with a "Family of 4 knocks out old man in beef jerky dispute" headline, I think we made the right choice ;)

And #36, yes, my husband did "step up"...but he did so by trying to firmly encourage the old man to lower his voice and calm down. That was when the challenge to "step outside" came about. Now, if the old dude had actually taken a swing at any of us, my husband (and I) certainly wouldn't have had any qualms about leveling him. But we're NOT violent lunatics, so flattening him wasn't our first choice of action ;) We tried to just move away from him, thinking he would calm down once he got his jerky fix...but he chose to follow us to the check-out line...and if he followed us to the parking lot, we might have actually had to fight an old man in a parking lot. And even if he *reeeeeally* has it coming, injuring an old man isn't our idea of a fun Saturday. *sighs* Even as it went down, it really wasn't fun at all. Much too weird.