'Dollar Store Gooning': The Worst Possible Hobby Has Men Committing Sexual Assault For Fun And Profit
What a world!
Dollar Tree stores are a place of mystery and wonder for many of us, causing many customers to ask ourselves questions like “Are eight-year-old children making the things this place sells?” and “Does anyone actually work here?” and “Wait, Salon Selectives still exists?” (It does and it smells exactly the same.) Or even questions like “What evils am I contributing to if I buy purse candy here, the only brick-and-mortar store where they sell a lot of the purse candy I like?”
These are all valid questions to be asking in a Dollar Tree. What is not a question you should have to ask in a Dollar Tree is “Why is this strange man ejaculating on my leg?”
Unfortunately, that is exactly what increasing numbers of women across this strange nation have reportedly been asking themselves for the last several years as “Dollar Tree Gooning” has apparently become a thing.
An article published in The Guardian yesterday reports that such attacks at Dollar Tree have increased in recent years, from fewer than five per year before 2020 to “as many as 18 a year” since December 2023, and the article suggests it hasn’t come out of nowhere.
Featured in the article is the story of a woman identified only as MR, who is suing the Dollar Tree over the reported assault:
As she walked the aisles, MR said in an interview, she sensed a man standing close behind her. She turned to confront him and noticed that he was a good six inches taller than her. He was talking in graphic detail about sexual things he wanted to do to her. “You’re so disgusting, get away from me,” she told him, and hurried off to find her friend.
Still, he stayed close, and for a few tense minutes the two of them locked eyes while she waited in line to pay. When at last he left, she thought that was the end of it – until, back outside in the chill of the winter morning, she felt something cold against the back of her leggings.
The man had ejaculated on her.
“I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to kill this man,” said MR, who was 47 at the time, recalling the horror and helplessness she felt as her friend wiped her off with towels.
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
Why is she suing Dollar Tree? For the exact reason that these men may have chosen Dollar Tree as a place to prey on women: the stores are usually messy and chaotic and there are barely any employees there to stop them or make it awkward. Places like Dollar Tree often don’t want to spend the money on paying enough people enough money to properly man their stores, and as a result, not only is there more shoplifting (as we have previously discussed), but customers are less safe. And, it turns out, allegedly in danger of being ejaculated on. MR would later discover that it had happened at least twice, recently, at the very Dollar Tree she was assaulted in, and that one of them was even posted to social media.
She also discovered that there are entire forums dedicated to this online, men with OnlyFans accounts selling videos of themselves doing it for $25 a pop.
It even came with its own specialized vocabulary. Masturbating in public and surreptitiously ejaculating on random women was known as “tagging” or “sharking” – or even “cum-sharking”. Online forums praised perpetrators for being “low inhibition” or “low inhib”, and users contributing to the discussion said they wished they could summon the same fearlessness in themselves.
“Sharking,” by the way, also refers to an equally horrifying practice of ripping off women’s clothing in public and filming it.
[MR’s lawyers] could not establish how public MR’s assailant had been with his exploits, since he has never been identified. But they did find an individual going by the name “Goon-God”, who had a page on an amateur porn site offering more than 200 sharking videos for $25 – along with a promotional clip that appeared to show an attack on an oblivious Dollar Tree shopper as she pushed a cart along a crowded soap aisle.
Another gooner, who was caught filming himself while masturbating at a Dollar Tree in Fern Park, Florida, told police that he did this regularly “in different locations” and uploaded the videos to an OnlyFans page, according to his arrest report.
You will not be surprised to discover that this is also a popular topic of discussion on incel forums.
As the article notes, there have been multiple other well-publicized Dollar Store gooning attacks. One assault in Philadelphia was captured by the victim on her phone, as well as in surveillance tapes in the store, leading to Philadelphia-based rapper Meek Mill offering a $2,000 bounty for the creep — a man named Gary Miles who turned himself in within hours.
Miles, by the way, was wearing a T-shirt at the time that read “It’s not going to lick itself.”
He also had a history of similar behavior, having repeatedly snuck into the house of a woman and her daughter to masturbate, until they caught him one night doing it right in front of them.
Over the following months, the term “dollar store gooner” became a meme on the internet that spread far beyond the closed world of the gooners themselves. A “Dollar Tree gooner” crypto coin launched in January 2025, followed by an unofficial Pokémon card and a song released on SoundCloud by an underground noise band from Tennessee named Mukus.
In another case, it was actually an employee of Dollar Tree who was caught in the act.
The [security] video shows the defendant with his penis exposed as he walks past the register where the victim is checking out,” a police report quoted by a local TV station said. “The video also later shows the defendant rubbing his groin area for several minutes at the register while customers are present in the store.”
That guy was later arrested for going back to the store and attempting to take upskirt pictures of a 16-year-old girl.
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This is not an entirely new thing. There have always been subway flashers and frotteurs. It’s even something I had to contend with back when I worked in the mall as a teenager. Men would stand in clothing racks at Charlotte Russe and jerk off, or stand behind earring towers in The Icing and jerk off, and we’d have to call mall security and it would be a whole thing because usually they’d leave before they got there anyway. But those men were lone, random creeps, like the people who pooped in dressing rooms. They were not organized. They were not taping it and putting it online and charging people for it, thereby encouraging others to also get in on the “fun.” They were not, as far as I knew at least, proud of their exploits.
There does seem to be a different pathology at work here as well. Whereas flashers and public masturbators seem to get off from the elicitness of the act and the possibility of getting caught or humiliated themselves (or because they’re just perving on teenage girls in a mall store and are disgusting pedophiles), the Dollar Store Gooners appear to be more compelled by the degradation and humiliation of the women they go after. That was certainly the case on the incel forum posts I saw on the subject, which I’m not going to post here because they’re horrifying. I will,however, tell you that the men in the forum expressed their own desire to do such things to women and girls “in a video game” (which is what they say when they talk about crimes they’d like to commit, like the guy in a “related” thread who discussed his desire to murder his high school bully’s daughter in front of him “in GTA, of course”). It feels like it’s a whole lot less about sexual desire than it is about vengeance against women.
These men, however, may want to think twice about thinking they’re cute trying to pull this shit. In 2025, a man named Nautica Malone pulled up to the drive-thru at a Tempe, Arizona, coffee shop called Bikini Beans, with his dick on display and his hand upon it, looking at the baristas as though he was real hot shit. The baristas (apparently familiar with his bullshit) filmed the incident and posted it on the internet, leading to widespread public shaming. Malone would later commit suicide.
Now, the lesson that a lot of terrible people learned from that incident is that it’s bad to publicly shame men just for trying to get off by flashing you, but perhaps what they should have taken away is that it is not safe for men to do that to women. That they cannot count on the polite discretion of women they sexually harass or assault and that they, too, could be the ones who wind up feeling gross and humiliated.
[Guardian]
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
My partner was a manager of a Dollar Tree when we were still in NoCal. This is exactly how their corporate office told them to operate: bare bones hours so that there were NO employees, shit everywhere, boxes piled up, etc.
It was so bad there was one unhoused meth user that locked himself in the bathroom and shit everywhere and they couldn't get him out for a couple days.
No wonder these assholes can get away with it. The corporation is trash, much like most corporations are anymore.
The fact that the police didn't do anything about this incident is horrifying. They said she 'wasn't physically harmed', because the emotional damage doesn't count or something. The fear that we're being stalked and attacked. There's so much wrong with society and there are still people who wonder why women choose the bear.