‘All I asked for was sliced cheese’: Roommates bewildered after store employees hide, call the police

VIRGINIA (WRIC) — What began as a spontaneous trip to the store ended up being one of the most bizarre experiences of Ricky Berry’s life. He and his roommate went to purchase a grocery item and ended up having the police called on them.

Berry and his roommate said they walked into the CVS in Carytown and asked an employee if they sold sliced cheese. The worker kindly replied that they did not.

A few minutes later, the employee — all of the store employees, in fact — were nowhere to be found. Berry and his roommate, Philip Blackwell, said they were in the store with another customer for more than 30 minutes alone before an officer with the Richmond Police Department showed up.

“We looked around for probably 30, 45 minutes and we couldn’t find anybody,” Blackwell said.

As for the third customer who was as confused as the two roommates, Berry said. “He was in the store before we were actually. He had a bad tooth, all he wanted was some Orajel. That’s all he needed.”

“We were walking around trying to find an employee, and the cop himself ended up opening up the emergency door, which set the alarm off,” Berry explained. “A couple of minutes later, he got the call from the alarm company asking what was going on.”

So the officer joined in on the search for the missing employees. Berry recorded a video on his Snapchat account of what happened next.

“He was laughing with us because, like, this is how weird, apocalyptic movies start,” Berry said. Eventually, the employees were found in the back of the store hiding in a locked room. After making a few calls, the officer told the customers they had to leave.

In one of the videos he recorded, Berry said, “We’re being kicked out because they were scared of us and hiding.”

“He just told us that we need to leave premises or else we would be arrested for trespassing and that flipped the script on all of us,” Berry said. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Berry said the officer was kind and was just doing what he was told to do.

Multiple attempts to contact the store manager were denied, although a CVS spokesperson apologized and said the employee who called the police will be interviewed and possibly retrained.