I’m 30 minutes into my training session when the shrieking starts, a high-pitched keening that tilts into a growl: “Gimme that Mountain, gimme that Mountain Dew.” My trainer, a blue-haired anime boy with thick, round glasses and cat ears, stands in front of me silently as a soda carton sails over our heads.
“It’s a little more scary when they raid this aisle,” he finally says with an even tone as a group of acid-green cartoon characters run past us. Most visitors to the virtual Kmart aren’t quite so unruly. He leads my avatar—noodle-thin limbs supporting a hot dog torso—to a quieter aisle, and continues explaining how to assist customers.
Here in VRChat, a virtual online platform, you can be anything you want. It’s the kind of chaotic playground where people build whodunnits to play in real-time, recruit people into their chicken cults, and, apparently, work retail jobs. For the last 30 minutes, a player by the name of J3Cube has walked me through VRChat Kmart’s store values, departments, and everything else I’d need to know to work in a virtual version of the chain retailer.
Role-playing springs up in online communities all the time, even in objectively mundane ways like pretending to be office workers or part of an ant colony. Games like Second Life provide a platform for players to create digital worlds they can live in. The Kmart of VRChat combines the best of those ideas against the backdrop of a prosaic retail job, stuffed with details taken directly from real-life stores. Novelty is what gets people in the door. But often, what makes them stay is the chance to role-play the person they’d like to become.
Most retail jobs don’t inspire nostalgia. Ericirno feels differently. (Players we spoke to for this story requested the use of only their screen names for privacy.) A former Kmart employee who worked in the electronics department, Eric refers to his old coworkers as “a little work family.” He still thinks fondly of his customers and the stories they shared about their lives.
When his store shut down in fall of 2019, Eric began to recreate a Kmart in VRChat: flat-color shelves filled with toiletries and Chia Pets, aisles of garden and auto centers, and of course, an electronics department. He travels to Kmart locationss across the country, many of which have since closed, to take pictures. He then scans those photos of merchandise, fixtures, and signage into VRChat to use as 3D models.
He designed the original store specifically to recall a 1992 Kmart, for which he gathered old photos from former employees, images from press releases, and cassette tapes uploaded to archival websites for in-store music. The merchandise isn’t always historically accurate, but sometimes chosen to inspire nostalgia—think everything from Super Nintendo consoles to clunky VR headsets. “I wanted to re-create that feeling of the Kmart that everyone knew and loved,” he says. “The drop-down lights, the giant vents, the crusty floor tiles. You know, the stuff that everyone visited at Kmart for.”
Eric started the process alone, but people began to develop alongside him around summer 2020. Drawn to the oddity and the unmistakable big red K, other VRChat players became Kmart regulars or collaborators, helping to open new stores. A Super Kmart, a Kmart Express—each served a different purpose. Just as the original is a ’90s homage, the Super Kmart is based on the early 2000s, specifically before the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. Why those eras? “Because those were the two peaks of Kmart,” he says.
The VRChat Kmart development community began to “hire” employees the same way any store would. They asked for applications, and put employees through training. Trainers follow scripts for each new employee. Once hired, they wear Kmart badges and have a service pledge to follow, with rules like keeping aisles clear and checkout lanes to three customers or less. They’re told to smile and bid farewell to customers with a specific line: “Thank you for shopping at VRChat Kmart. I hope your shopping experience was excellent.” They have Black Friday sales and close on Christmas.
It may seem silly, and for some participants it is. But there’s also safety and comfort in training in a video game, especially for people who struggle with socializing. “Real-world experience can be traumatizing if you don’t go into it completely equipped,” says Carbon, VRChat Kmart’s chief communications officer.
Carbon describes herself as on the autism spectrum and suffering from severe anxiety. “Anyone in our group will tell you I do not touch grass,” she said. Her avoidance of other people is so strong she won’t even go get food if she can’t pick it up without avoiding eye contact. But the safety of a virtual net allows her to be social online. Or have conversations with overly peppy, inquisitive journalists.
Carbon went from keeping to herself in the K Cafes to eventually building up the nerve to apply for a position. Today, it’s practically a second full-time job for her. She refers to herself as “Mama Carbon” when dealing with behavioral problems among the community, a role she plays by trying to talk to and educate players before resorting to outright bans as part of a warning system.
Trolls she can mute or block. VRC Kmart employee infractions require more nuanced solutions. The store maintains its own HR department and documents complaints, which can be filed anonymously. If an employee were to report a homophobic comment by a coworker, Carbon would step in to do “a little bit of parenting,” explaining to the employee in question, “This is why we don’t do this to our friends.”
“That’s one of the differences between us and an actual place of employment,” she says. “We’re here to help you be a better person. We’re not a job. We’re not your government. We are not the moral police force of the internet. We’re here to try to get everyone to work together willingly.”
A Belgian player who goes by ThisMight has found growth through VRC Kmart employment. He stumbled across the store while on the hunt for milk and decided to stick around, joining the game’s discord, then its dev team. After going through in-game training, he got an associate gig, posting up in the electronics department behind counters filled with pixelated boxes of movies or games. He’s never seen a Kmart in real life.
VRChat isn’t set up to fully mimic a store experience—there is no sophisticated system to check out, for example—so players take their role-playing duties very seriously. Despite a strict rule that customers can only buy electronics in that section, people often came to ThisMight’s counter with garden shop items or food. “This is electronics,” he would yell, turning them away. “You have to go into the checkout lanes!”
ThisMight eventually worked his way up to manager. Now instead of being stuck behind a counter he walks through the store to check on associates and customers who might need help. He helps select items for the Blue Light sections that denote Kmart sales, like Kodak cameras, because “no one cared about them.” Why did he care so much about the Kodaks? “Because every single item is special in electronics.”
VRChat’s Kmart heads are insistent that real lives come first, meaning players can choose to work—they clock in—for just a few minutes at a time, but ThisMight sometimes put in anywhere from four to six hours. There are no rules to how long people work because there’s no money changing hands. “It would be insane if you have to pay like 200 people for absolutely nothing,” he says. (This also means there are no unions, though people often joke about it.)
The actual payoff has been worth more for ThisMight, who suffers from social anxiety. “I wanted some real-life work experience in a safe environment,” he says of his decision to take a virtual job. “I thought that joining a store would be one of the best steps to stop social anxiety, because I am forced to speak with people from that point onward.” ThisMight described himself previously as a bystander, more likely to turn tail than intervene. “Now I have the willpower to speak up and say something about it,” he said.
Clashes happen. This is a community that draws in people with wildly different politics, religions, and life experiences. But it’s also the only place where some people feel validated, or free to use their preferred gender expression in a social setting. “There are members in this community where this is their primary family … people where their home life isn’t that great, so they come to these communities,” Carbon says. “You start to become very reliant on these groups of people.” If Carbon and other higher-ups can’t set a good example for conflict resolution, “how can we expect them to go into life?”
Sometimes all it takes is a sit-down. “You get kids that come from the middle of nowhere that have no exposure to people of different orientations or lifestyles or gender expressions,” she says. “And well, some of them come equipped with some pretty spicy words. We explain kind of how that everyone is a person behind the username. And if we can get that through someone’s head, and we can feel from a very sincere perspective that things are going to get better, we can let things go.”
Back in the store, as my training is wrapping up, a soda-chucking, Teletubby-esque avatar watches us talk. My cat-boy trainer wants to know whether I have questions while the VR voyeur slowly peeps out from behind a shelf. By now, it’s feeling all very intuitive, and not unlike the rules I’ve had in my former retail jobs.
Business comes in waves, as do the people who decide to work there. It’s the early afternoon and store counters are mostly unmanned, as people transition in their real lives from the end-of-summer days to more regular working hours.
Near the returns and exchanges counter, a sign reads “Not All Heroes Wear Capes … Our Heroes Wear Kmart Shirts.” Wayward Mountain Dew cartons litter the ground, waiting for someone to pick them up.
