Realistically the reason this happens isn't laziness, it's because stocking a section has an order to it, especially during a reset. All these big stores work with teams so one guy goes through and pulls all of the stuff marked for clearance in the system, tags it, and sets it up in the clearance section. Then the next day someone works on resetting the shelves and pegs to planogram in preparation for the new product. Then once that's finished the tagging crew comes through and tags all the pegs and shelves with sku price tags so that the stockers know where the new product is supposed to go. Then overnight or early morning the warehouse crew goes through and breaks down the truck pallets into sections, so the stockers have the product avalible in the area to put on the shelves. Then the next overnight or morning the stockers go through and fill the shelves with the product. Because of this the only chance you realistically have of asking someone to check the back is if you ask a stocker and not just some random employee from a different section/team because the stocker is the only person that is supposed to be pulling from the shipment boxes. Another employee is highly unlikely to even know where to look for what you're looking for, and unlikely to help because they shouldn't be pulling product out the back. So let's say you ask an employee and it happens to be the toy section stocker. They might go look for you, but the only way you're actually going to get it if it's in the store is if the item is in the boxes that have already been sectioned off the pallets. The stocker isn't allowed to pull product off of the pallets, only the warehouse guys are allowed to do that. That's the only chance you have of it working. And that's aside from street dates which is why random employees are wary of grabbing product for you, and also Target's anti-scalper policy. (But the enforcement of that depends store to store.)
