05/23/2026
To the gentleman who turned The Soft Shirt Place into an unexpected live performance of Riverdance: Bathroom Emergency Edition yesterday…
Let’s clear a few things up.
Our store was empty when this man came in, clearly under the influence of something harder than pancakes, doing a full nervous jig while repeatedly saying he needed the bathroom. Ashley calmly directed him to it. Not once. Not twice. THREE times. The bathroom is literally at the end of the hallway.
Instead of walking to it, he stayed inside the store continuing the performance while making no effort to leave the front area.
Then, because apparently the situation wasn’t uncomfortable enough already….. he looked Ashley directly in the eye and announced that he had “had an accident” on the mat in front of the register. (Even though he actually hadn’t….. 🤷🏼♀️)
A grown man. In a family business.
Ashley is kind. She’s patient. She’s funny. What she is NOT is responsible for managing grown adults behaving inappropriately and making her feel uncomfortable and unsafe while she’s trying to work.
And since apparently this needs to be said out loud: our security cameras are there for SECURITY. We are not sitting around looking for embarrassing footage to post online for entertainment. But when someone comes into our business, behaves erratically, refuses to leave, and causes our staff to feel threatened? Yes. We will absolutely use footage to protect ourselves and publicly call out unacceptable behavior. And yes, we have shown the footage to local law enforcement.
Actions have consequences.
To the fellow business owners who immediately came running when Ashley sent out an SOS text: thank you. Small business owners look out for each other, and yesterday proved exactly why that matters.
And to everyone else: please remember the people behind retail counters are actual human beings, not emotional support workers for whatever chaos you decided to bring into a store that day.
Now if you need us, we’ll be over here trying to process the fact that “the bathroom is at the end of the hallway” somehow became the hardest instruction given in Gatlinburg this week.
