Can you be a Target employee for a day?

Red shirt? Check. Khaki pants? Check. An employee position at Target? Not so much.

When the Falcon staff dared us to pretend to walk around Target wearing the usual employee garb, we had no idea what was in store for us.

Ignoring the butterflies in our stomachs, we cautiously tiptoed through the front entrance and carefully peered into every aisle.

This was going to be tougher than we thought.

We couldn’t even find a place to station ourselves because it seemed like there was always an employee in sight, and they would surely know we were frauds. Thinking that there would be fewer workers on the top floor, we sprinted up the escalator.

We were wrong.

The top floor was swamped with even more employees. Nasty looks followed us as we tried to blend in with the shelves of toys and board games. We constantly found ourselves pretending to be regular shoppers in an effort to avoid an awkward conversation with a Target employee.

They can’t kick you out of Target for wearing red shirts and khaki pants, right?

After finally dodging the employees, we decided to walk through the toy aisles because we expected there would be parents with their children looking for assistance to find certain toys and games. After realizing that there weren’t many people in the toy aisles, we headed to the clothing racks and pretended to fold clothes.

Surprisingly, an actual Target employee came up to us and asked “Can I help you?” completely overlooking our carefully planned disguises.

While we were walking through the clothing aisles, ready to give up, a man came up to us and asked if we worked here.

We immediately and enthusiastically said yes, delighted that someone bought our act. He proceeded to ask us where he could find coffee mugs. After looking around nervously in a futile attempt to find an aisle related to kitchen items, we directed him to the sporting goods section, to which he gave us a confused look but thanked us and walked away.

Soon realizing that there were more employees upstairs than actual customers, we proceeded downstairs again.

Because we actually needed groceries, we went into the food aisles assuming that we had finished the experiment. Not too many people had approached us so far, probably because we looked a little too young to be working at Target.

To our delight, one man came up to us and asked where the cupcake mix was. This time, we were (somewhat) able to point him in the right direction through jumbled phrases (“That aisle, over there; no THAT one”) and a lot of frantic pointing to various aisles. He was already in the food section; he would find it eventually anyway.

While we were loading our baskets with various groceries, two women came up to us and one of them asked if we worked at Target, her voice booming with intimidation.

We said yes, to which she asked why we had baskets in our hands filled with a random selection of food.

To avoid suspicion, we quickly told her we were arranging items and as we left, we heard her say under her breath to her friend, “That’s not arranging, that’s just pushing things around.” Realizing that the chances of being caught were increasing by the minute, we decided to make a break for it.

As we exited the aisle, we saw an employee walking toward us from the right. Turning to head in the opposite direction, we saw another coming from the left. Looking straight ahead of us we saw another coming toward us from the front. Cornered behind soda cans and cereal, we immediately looked at each other in fear and ran in opposite directions, heading toward the entrance.

We quickly bought eggs, ignoring the questioning look that the cashier gave us, and got out of the store as fast as we could.

Speaking from the little experience we gained, being a fake Target employee is much harder than we expected. Catching our breath, we grew to appreciate the difficulty of working at a retail store, dealing with condescending and rude people on a daily basis.

As for the success of our challenge — spending the day pushing things (and people) around — we’d say we were just a bit off-target.

To the employees and customers we interacted with, we hope you know that it was a harmless experiment. Now we just have to find out how to go back to Target without being recognized or banned from the store … They wouldn’t have a Most Wanted List, would they?