Retail Worker Says a Coworker Stared at Her for Two Years — Then Started Appearing in Her Aisles During Every Lunch Break

A retail worker says she spent more than two years trying to dismiss a coworker’s staring as awkwardness or maybe a harmless crush. But after other people started noticing it too, and he kept appearing in the aisles where she was working without buying anything, she began wondering if the behavior was turning into something more serious.

She explained in a Reddit post that the coworker works in a different department and has been staring at her almost nonstop since he joined the store.

At first, she tried not to make a big deal out of it. Plenty of workplaces have people who are socially awkward, quiet, or bad at acting normal around someone they like. She thought maybe he had a crush and did not know how to handle it.

But the staring did not stop.

She said multiple people confirmed that he watched her when she was not aware of it. Then, whenever she looked up and caught him, he quickly looked away.

That pattern alone made her uneasy because it meant she was not imagining it. Other people had seen the same thing. It was not one awkward glance in a break room or a one-time moment where someone accidentally stared too long. It had been happening for years.

Still, the coworker barely interacted with her.

That was part of what made it so confusing. He did not really try to talk to her. He did not openly ask her out. He did not create a scene. Instead, he kept hovering at a distance, staring, and then pretending not to when she noticed.

Lately, she said the behavior had shifted in a way that felt harder to brush off. During his lunch breaks, he kept seeming to “bump into” her while she was working in store aisles.

If she was working down an aisle, he would walk down that same aisle but not grab anything. Sometimes he would stand there for a while, then leave.

At first, she told herself it might be a coincidence. Retail stores are public spaces, and employees from different departments can end up in the same places. But the pattern kept happening.

The freezer aisle was the moment that stood out to her.

She said she was working down the freezer aisles when she noticed him stop and stare after realizing she was there. Once she noticed him, he moved to the next aisle, then came around from the other end where she was and walked through again.

He still did not grab anything.

Other times, he would stare at something strange, like frozen pizzas, in a way that did not make sense to her. She found that odd because he was on lunch break, the break room did not have a way to bake a frozen pizza, and as an employee, he could look up where any item was located in the store if he actually needed something.

To her, it did not feel like shopping.

It felt like finding excuses to be where she was.

The worker said this had happened several times. He always seemed to end up getting his lunch around the area where she happened to be working. She could not tell if he wanted to talk, wanted her to notice him, or simply liked watching her from nearby.

From what she had heard, he had no love life but was considered a chill, nice guy toward everyone else. That made her question herself even more. If he was kind to others and had never directly threatened her, was she reading too much into it?

But being “nice” to everyone else did not erase the fact that she felt watched.

That is what pushed her to ask if she was overreacting. She did not want to label someone a stalker unfairly. She also did not want to ignore the early signs of behavior that could get worse.

The situation had not reached the point of him following her home or contacting her outside work, at least based on what she shared. But inside the store, the pattern was persistent enough that she was losing the ability to dismiss it.

Two years is a long time to feel watched at work.

And for her, the concern was not only what he had done so far. It was the fact that he kept choosing proximity without conversation, kept appearing during breaks, and kept looking away when caught.

Commenters mostly told her she was not overreacting and encouraged her to trust her instincts. Several said that even if the coworker was only socially awkward, the pattern was still making her uncomfortable and needed to be addressed.

One commenter asked whether her employer had HR or someone she could report the behavior to. That was the practical advice many people circled around: document what was happening and involve a manager or HR before it escalated.

Others said the fact that multiple people had noticed him staring mattered. It showed the poster was not simply being paranoid or misreading one interaction.

Some commenters suggested she avoid confronting him alone. They said if she did decide to say something, it should be in a controlled setting or through management, not while isolated in an aisle.

A few people said it might be an awkward crush, but even then, they agreed it was not her job to make herself uncomfortable so he could keep hovering around her. If he wanted to talk to her, he could do that in a normal, respectful way.

The strongest advice was to stop minimizing the pattern just because nothing huge had happened yet. Feeling watched at work for two years is not nothing.