In the video, the bear walks down the coffee and soft drink aisle of a Dollar General store, turns left at the ice cream freezer, and advances past the Campbell’s soup and mac and cheese.

“This is not good,” the man taking the video says. “No,” a woman agrees.

The whole thing was definitely not good. A bear was walking slowly through a discount store in a strip mall along a highway in the rural reaches of northern New Jersey, and it seemed confused. The bear looked left, looked right, padded along past shelves of tinfoil and dish soap, walked right past displays of popcorn balls and Doritos.

“Come on boy, come on,” says the man taking the video, trying to lead the bear to the exit.

At this point — approximately 4 p.m. on Tuesday — the bear had already scratched or bitten a 90-year-old woman in the store, the Vernon Township police said. She was apparently unfazed: Christine Flohr, 55, a budtender at the cannabis store next door, walked into the Dollar General to witness the excitement, saw the woman in the aisles and urged her to leave.

“I told her, ‘There’s a bear in the store.’ She said, ‘I know, he swiped at me,’” Ms. Flohr said. The woman kept shopping. “I found that odd,” said Ms. Flohr.

The bear eventually left the store. But things did not end well for the bear.

Black bears are not an uncommon sight in Sussex County, in the Appalachian highlands. As of Aug. 21, there had been 294 bear “incidents” in Sussex County this year, by far the most of any county in the state, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Incidents include both simple sightings and encounters like “attempted home entry” or “livestock kill.” There is no category for bears in commercial establishments.

This bear, a 175-pound female, had been wandering among the parking lots of State Route 94 for several hours. The police first encountered it at 1:39 p.m., they said, and chased it from the Dollar General parking lot. “They hit the bear with rubber buckshot,” said Aaron Glading, the owner of Goodfella’s, the restaurant next door, “but it didn’t affect the bear at all. It was in a daze, just roaming around.”