Two young girls, adolecent or nearly so:
Girl1: Grandma, would you buy us each two books if we clean your house really really good?
Girl2: I wish I had a million dollars so that I could have all these books.
Grandma: I don’t know what I could have you do that would be worth that…
Girl2: I wish I had brought my money then I could get 3 books
Girl1: Oh, then you’d be torturing me (said good naturedly.) We could clean your big refridgerator. We could vacuum. Please Grandma?
This scene tugs at my heart. I actually am not really all that fond of kids, but these two seem like good kids and I think that all kids should be taught the joy of reading. Grandma doesn’t seem to be a woman of means and the girls give the impression that they don’t get books that often. I grew up poor and loved to read, but couldn’t afford books that often. I’m tempted to offer to buy the girls the books. Can I do it without offending Grandma? Will my offer be misconstrued and I viewed as a dirty old lech? Mayby I’m wrong, maybe Grandma can afford the books, but just doesn’t want to spoil the kids. Looks can be decieving and what do I really know? I decide that even though I mean well, perhaps I should mind my own business. I move on, but I wonder all the way home how this could have been handled gracefully.
Young Boy, 4 or 5: Where ya goin’ dad?
Dad: The men’s room.
Boy: Why? To poop? Said in a volume that only young children and bullhorns can acheive.
Dad ignores him.
Boy: To poop? Do you have to poop Dad?
Dad, in a low voice: Yes.
Boy: You pooped before we left, you gotta poop again?
Dad: Yes
Boy: You sure poop alot dad.
Everyone is smiling, seeming to resist the urge to chuckle. Poor guy.
I love the book store.
Another mundane and pointless thread brought to you by Khadaji. 
Thanks for the chuckle.
Re: buying books for kids. Why not become a regular donor to your local library? (My library system even has an option where you can get a bookplate dedicating a specific type of book to someone.) This will insure kids who like books will be able to come enjoy a decent selection that isn’t all old and beat up.
Also, around xmastime there are a lot of toy drives for kids. You might want to give some fun books then. (A lot of places have “wish trees” where specific kids write what they want on paper ornaments. You pluck off the ornament of something you want to buy and purchase the item and bring it to the charity who then forwards it to the child. The kids usually ask for things like walkmen or games, but I’ve seen quite a few asking for books. I’ve seen the wish trees at local banks as well as a few malls.)
Actually, I usually do a Toys for Tots drive each year, but I found that they do not consider books to be toys. 4 years ago when Harry Potter was first hot, I went out and bought a bunch of HP books in hard back. They were turn away, because they weren’t considered to be toys. 
Bolding mine. Is it possible that Grandma had already bought the girls each one book and they were just wheedling for more? The conversation sounds a bit over the top, as if the girls were trying to manipulate Grandma. Perhaps she’d been spending money on them all day and had reached her limit. Kids tend to want stuff everytime you take them anywhere, no matter how much stuff they already have. And when they know you’ve already been overly generous, they start promising to do stuff that they will never actually do.
I think you did right to stay out of it.
Maybe… But it was 10 in the morning and they didn’t look to me like they had a lot of spare cash. But as I said before, looks can be deceiving.
Maybe it was a bit of wheedling, and a bit of true “not getting often”? If I were those girl’s grandmother, I might ask them to give some time to consider, and to let me alone while I did. I’d then carefully consider if I should allow them to persuade me to “let them contract their services for goods” and if so, how to go about it in such a way to convey the proper values? (For instance, specify that good efforts should be made to do the work well, and complete it, I’m not sure if I’d buy the books before the jobs were done or not, a bit jaded I am.) I think it’s good they were offering to work for the things, they didn’t expect a free ride. I’d like to hope they’d do their best jobs if they were hired too. At the same time, people shouldn’t expect to get rewarded every time they do something good. Though, they were the ones making the offer to do work in exchage for something they’d like so it might not be that. It’s a poser that’s for certain. 