This isn’t your grandma’s safety poster. Don’t Spend the Rest of Your Life Scaring Kids at the Grocery Store takes workplace safety and strips it down to the ugly, embarrassing truth: nobody wants to be that guy. The one standing in the checkout line while two kids hide behind a shopping cart, peeking at the twisted mess of scars and missing fingers you earned by “just skipping PPE this one time.”

The image doesn’t show gore, doesn’t need to. Cold fluorescent lighting, kids’ wide eyes, the awkward tension you can feel through the frame — it’s enough to make every worker think twice before they fire up a machine without the guard in place. It’s dark humor with a gut punch, the kind of thing your crew will remember long after they’ve tuned out the standard “Safety First!” posters collecting dust in the break room.

Hang this poster anywhere you need people to wake up and take safety seriously: near machine shops, maintenance areas, loading docks, or right next to the time clock where they’ll see it every day. It’s not about fear — it’s about reality. About the long-term consequences no one likes to talk about. About how one bad decision at work doesn’t just change your body, it changes how the world looks at you.

Because nothing says “you should’ve worn your PPE” quite like a kid shrinking away in a grocery store aisle.