I’m not always a fan of the cliche, but every once in a while, they do come in handy. For instance, I was in Office Depot one Sunday morning, picking up something, when suddenly a lady simply explodes on the cashier about how she absolutely has to get the item in her basket for the price on the shelf. It seems that since someone neglected to remove last week’s sale price from the item in question, not only does she want to get the discount from last week’s sale, she also wants to get the “buy two, get one free” from this week’s sale.
Now don’t get me wrong here – I’m not against taking advantage of an opportunity when one arises. That isn’t the point, so please don’t let me give you the wrong idea. If the price is still up from last week on the item in question, and the riser has this week’s new sale on it, the lady is likely entitled to the pricing, and I’m all for it.It’s the fact that she’s saving a grand total of fifty cents and she didn’t even have to raise her voice to to it that really has me confused.
Mistakes happen. In just about every retail establishment across the country, there is a good chance that you can find a tag from last week’s sale that someone didn’t take down in time. When you have a hundred items on sale, and you’re talking about people who are being paid minimum wage to tag (and, by extension, untag) everything, coupled with the fact that they have no inherent interest in whether the sale items are correct in the first place, mistakes happen. They happen anyway, but this formula just makes it even more likely to happen. So why not take advantage of it? As I mention, that isn’t the issue.
Just as often as you can find such a situation, you’re likely to figure out that there is going to be someone at that store who doesn’t want to give you the price. This may be a well-intentioned cashier who is trying their best to do the right thing, and they are just doing their job, or maybe it’s someone who had a bad night last night, but invariably, someone is only too happy to try and take it away from you. This isn’t the point either, because in this case, the cashier didn’t even have a chance to tell the lady – and I use the term somewhat loosely here – didn’t give him the chance.
As is often the case in stores such as these, the cashier simply scanned the item, and as would be expected, it came up at the now current price, which as would be expected, wasn’t what was on the shelf. The shopper (sorry, I can’t call her a lady more than once), waiting to pounce like a lion on a wildebeest, saw that the regular price came up, as she knew it would, and jumped all over the unsuspecting cashier, who of course had no way of knowing what was in store. Lest you aren’t sure, this really isn’t the point either. Any alert shopper will know that watching the items as they ring up is a good idea, and sometimes you need to get the cashier’s attention in order to get it corrected.
What is the problem is that she wouldn’t stop long enough to give the poor guy a chance to figure out what was wrong, berating him as if he was intentionally reaching into her purse and taking out money. And speaking of money, we’re not talking about someone who spotted computers on sale for hundreds of dollars off. We’re talking school supplies. Specifically, I think it was colored pencils that were on sale. The total savings had to be less than a dollar. I’m scared to think what this person would do when she buys a car.
After several minutes of this, the cashier, who had no idea what to do because the line was getting rather long by that point, called for reinforcements. The manager, similarly unaware that an errant sign had slipped through the cracks, tried to appease the woman, but she was so far into her routine that even he couldn’t break through. Finally, some ten minutes after it began, she had her cheap set of pencils – and a free extra box too. The manager, to his credit, opened another line to try and help us poor souls trapped behind this woman.
What I just can’t get is why someone would get so worked up over so little. You’d have to think that saving a dollar or two is nice, but surely the amount of hatred that spewed forth would take time off of her life, and that has to be worth at least a couple of bucks to this woman, doesn’t it? Obviously she has no concern for other people, since she made everyone else wait in line after her, so her time is certainly worth more than everyone else’s, and since it’s so valuable, you’d think that just her time alone would be worth more than the amount she saved. Maybe she would even have a personal shopper to buy her colored pencils or something.
To rub salt in the wound – had she heard it – us peons at the other end of the line could easily overhear the manager, who told a co-worker that he would have been happy to give her the price on the shelf, if she would have just given her the chance to do so. That would have let her get her shopping done so much earlier, and saved the rest of us time to boot.
What is it with these people that allows them to exist in such a bubble? Not twenty minutes later there was another one in line at Aldi, and when she found that she was missing something, she simply waltzed back to the cooler and picked it up. Now those of you who have shopped Aldi may not find this abnormal, and while you’re not at the front of the line, that’s correct – but this shopper was at the front, and the cashier was waiting on them to pay their bill! Where do these people come from?