The Manager would like a word with you...NOW.
- Failing to do your job ends in a terrifying way. The lights go out. The Eldritch Location that is the supermarket looks more creepy than ever, with only light from outside barely illuminating this place. The Manager erupts from his office. And he is bloody furious - glowing with an ominous yellow light. Running after you with impossible speed for a human. He's hunting you down, in the darkness. You're alone and can't escape him. He's chained all the doors shut. The Manager knows instinctively where you are at all times. Even if by some game-breaking miracle you clip out-of-bounds, he will still find you. He suddenly catches you, what follows is presumably him throttling you to death, all while never breaking his evil smile. A sinister demonic voice out of the infernal abyss of Hell screams "FIRED!".
- Doing well is no better, since it means the Player Character is likely sentenced to a fate similar to the poor soul in the storage room, with the Manager referring to you as "a fine specimen", as if you were some sort of cattle he was grooming for just the right moment.
- The Consumers behave more like undead legions of the damned, rather than ordinary customers. They look possessed. Crowds of them have gathered outside the store. They're banging on the doors and windows endlessly. Those that manage to force their way in, progressively get more demented, moaning and giggling "puuurchassse" and running round the store aimlessly looking for a product that can never fill the void inside.
- You will learn to fear the words "Excuse me!" and "Please help me!", as they are often your only warning before some customer suddenly grabs you from out of nowhere after catching you before getting uncomfortably close to your face with their Nightmare Face. The music gets anxiety-filled and panicky as they begin to lose their tempers. The doors weirdly and suddenly lock themselves up, as if letting you know, there's no escape.
- There's a hidden room behind a crack in the wall in the staff-only stock room, which only accessible via a box. This hidden room contains a skeleton. According to the tally-marks on the wall behind it, whoever this poor soul was was being kept in there for ninety days, and all on the wall near it are scrawls that say "Don't Trust Manager." Worst of all, it is implied that this skeleton was Lester, who was the Employee of the Month that recently went missing.
- The game's premise is mundane enough, you're a retail worker tasked with stocking shelves and helping customers find items they need. However, everything is just so off. The customers all behave like zombies, and the products have unpleasant subliminal messages on their labels. That's to say nothing of the Manager, an Ambiguously Human Stepford Smiler who, it's implied, murders his employees for the most minor of errors.
- The premise actually is particularly terrifying in that, obvious exaggerated moments aside, this is a fairly realistic depiction of what retail CAN be like and plays on that fear quite well. Customers making unreasonable demands and getting pissed off if you aren't spot on perfect within seconds, being unable to actually finish your job cause people won't leave you alone (which is often still considered YOUR failure and responsibility just as in the game), and while most managers wouldn't go so far as to kill you, a boss overreacting and punishing you in overreacted ways is still within the realm of possibility. All in all, it shows that this is really what it's like to work in retail, and how absolutely hellish it can be, especially with horrible customers and bosses that act like slavedrivers.
