The backstory: my wife and I use melatonin as a sleep aid, but we don’t need the heavy stuff. Even though you can buy it in 3mg, 5mg, and 10mg strengths, we just need the 300 mcg strength, 1/10 the concentration of the next level up. 3 mg at night would probably leave me comatose half the next day.
And though it’s been getting harder to find in the stores where we normally shop, there’s always been somewhere that we might otherwise find ourselves at where we could buy it. Six or seven weeks ago, I stopped into the K-Mart in Prince Frederick, MD in between doctor’s appointments, noticed they had it, and bought a couple of jars of it.
It had been the first time in years that I’d been in a K-Mart, and my general reactions were: (1) it still sucks, but (2) they’ve got melatonin in 300 mcg strength.
So today, our errands were going to take us right by that same K-Mart, so I had my wife stop there so I could buy some more.
The list price was $8.99 a bottle, which is a bit steep, but it was buy-one, get-one-free. Which would have been reasonable. Except that, in the 3300 mcg strength, they had exactly one bottle. So I grabbed the bottle and took it to the register, figuring that I’d probably have to ask the cashier to call the manager, but the manager would have the good sense to not charge me full price for the bottle.
It’s 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, but there’s a serious line at each of the two open registers. (Don’t ask me where these people come from at this time of day, or why they’re shopping in K-Mart.) Do they open up another register? Not on your life. Ten or twelve minutes later, I finally get to the front of one of the lines, and explain the situation to the cashier.
He calls over the first-level manager, who offers me 10% off. I explain to her that I’d love to buy two bottles for $8.99, but I can only buy one, so I should really get it at half the two-bottle price.
I mean, I know they do the buy-1-get-1-free deal to get you to buy two when you’d normally just buy one, but that isn’t an option. No sales technique in the world will get me to buy a bottle that they don’t have - never mind the fact that if they had them, I’d stock up and buy four or six bottles. So there’s no reason for them to not sell me the last bottle for $4.50, other than sheer idiocy.
But sure enough, idiocy is their game. As I’m headed out, the second-level manager comes over, and she backs up the first-level manager: 10% is as much discount as I’m going to get. Two bottles for $8.99, one for $8.09. (Again, this would make sense if they only had a second bottle to sell me.) But she volunteers to look in the back to see if there’s another bottle.
As she heads to the back of the store, she’s not moving very fast, but at this point, I figure if she’s doing this for me, the least I should do is stick around. But it takes another ten or twelve minutes for her to get back…triumphantly holding a bottle of 5 mg strength melatonin.
I tell her that’s 20 times the strength of the stuff I was trying to buy, she says that’s all there is in the back, and I leave. >25 minutes wasted, and boy howdy, I’ve learned my lesson. Just all-around suckitude - no effort made to do something about the lines (despite two managers being on hand) at a time of day when lines should be minimal, either unreasonableness on the part of the store managers, or insufficient flexibility granted to them by the chain (all the same to me, really), and a bit of inattentiveness and stupidity at glacial speed to put the cherry on top.
Like I said, it had been several years since the last time I darkened the door of a K-Mart when I found myself inside one several weeks back. It’ll be quite a while before I make the same mistake again. At this point, their main accomplishment seems to be to make Wally World look good by comparison.