Ran to wal-mart store to grab some stuff. It was late night and only 2 checkers open. I came upon the lane just as the guy was finishing up checking a cart full to the brim of new school clothes for a mom and about 6 kids.
“That will be $786.23” he said.
The mom looked surprised. And said “ohh, I only have $240”. She looked at the checker hopefully. After about 30 seconds of him not having any idea what he was supposed to say. She sighed and started sorting through for put backs. I backed out of line realizing that it was going to be a long ordeal.
Now I have sympathy for money issues. And shopping at wal-mart is pretty economical. I have also had to go through the shame of digging through pockets and recounting before having to subtract stuff in front of a backing up line after missing my budget, so I feel for her.
But how the hell do you over-shoot by $500?! That’s 300% of the budget available. Don’t you have some sort of a mental sum that let’s you know about what you have spent? That is mind-blowingly bad math.
Oh man, only at Wal-Mart.
I have seen this plenty of times there.
It seems to be common practice of some people to bring everything they want up to the checkout, have the cashier ring it up, and then have them start taking items off one-by-one until the total agrees with them.
Drives me berzerk.
Reason #237 why I avoid Wal-Mart as often as humanly possible.
The Other Shoe and I got some gift cards to Wal-Mart last Christmas and finally got around to dragging ourselves to Wal-Mart the other weekend.
It was quite literally the only thing we got done that day.
Took half of forever to find the stuff on our list (finding a new plastic laundry hamper was like digging for archeological treasure) and there seemed to be no air in the store. Like on an airplane, where everyone is breathing in everyone else’s air. No store employees anywhere, not that the rare employee we could find could answer any of our questions anyway.
Once we got home and put all the stuff away, we flopped down on the couch in exhaustion, vowing never to go back. We didn’t move for an hour. I’ve never been so wrung out from running a simple errand.
Dear Og, if after all that, the person in front of us had pulled what the OP describes … I’d probably have resorted to murder.
This is why I always round up to the next dollar when I’m keeping track of the price of what’s in my cart. It doesn’t matter if something is 15 cents or 99 cents, I count it as one dollar.
As for the OP, I wonder what she was expecting when she was looking at the cashier hopefully. Did she think he might be able to make up the difference from the take a penny leave a penny tray?
You can laugh at that, but I used to know a woman at my old work whose son worked at Walgreen’s. Whenever someone came in and didn’t have enough money for diapers or whatever, he let them take the item for whatever they could give him. :eek: He was fired.
I won’t shop at Wal-Mart. It makes my skin crawl to go in there. Ours is dirty, filled with cheap crap no one could possibly want (sadly, this is not true) and out of the way of my daily round. Blech.
I’m [very] bad at maths, and I have a Software Engineering Degree.
I do something similar to emcee2k. If something costs £1.79 it’s £2.00. If something costs 39p it’s 50p.
on those rare occasions I’ve mis-calculated (because of wanting to get the hell out of there and not really engaging brain) I’ve only had to remove one item.
Yeah, when I read the OP, my first thought was, “You know what’s a lot cheaper than kid’s clothes? Condoms.” So I knew exactly where you were going.
I too have found Wal Mart to have an absolutely soul-sucking atmosphere. Somehow Target manages to be economical and have everything under the sun, and yet when I go there, the parking isn’t nightmarish, the store is bright and cheery, there are people to help you if you need it, and I don’t feel like my score on the Edinburgh Scale went up several points. What is it about Wal Mart then?
When I worked at Wal-Mart (somehow I escaped with my soul intact and now refuse to set foot in one) we were always finding stolen used pregnancy tests in the bathrooms.
If you can’t afford the $6.00 house brand pregnancy test, WTF makes you think you can afford a child???
My brother-in-law loves Wal-Mart. LOVES IT. He visits us for a few weeks every year, and is always coming up with ideas for things that we might need to buy for the house, which we could purchase at Wal-Mart. Sometimes I am tempted to just drive him over there and drop him off for a few hours like you would leave a 2-year-old at day care. I think it’s because he travels a lot and stays in really rural areas, and sometimes Wal-Mart is the only civilization he has access to.
Anyway. Having worked in a fast food restaurant for a while, I ran across my share of customers that would try to scam free food out of us one way or another. Ordering a ton of food and then saying, “Ooh, I only have $5” and looking at me hopefully was pretty common. I guess these people thought that there was a chance I would just shrug and say, “Aw, keep it anyway.” (I never did this.) Although hoping that the cashier would just wave off $500 worth of merchandise goes well beyond your standard Egg McMuffin-level scam.
Gawd, do I ever love these situations. I had one happen at work a while back.
Customer: Yeah, I’d like 50 copies of the file on this disc.
Me: Sure. Would you like it in color or black and white
Customer: Well, the file is in color, isn’t it?!? (In a raised, high pitch voice that suggests that I’m an unobservant idiot.)
Me: Okay. I just wanted to make sure because color copies are a bit more expensive than black & white copies.
Customer: It doesn’t matter what they cost. I need them printed exactly as they look on the computer.
*5 minutes later
Me: Okay. You’re total’s going to come up to $25.97 with tax.
Customer: $25.97? How’d you get that?!?
Me: 50 color copies at 49¢ per comes up to $24.50 + tax.
Customer: Well, why didn’t you tell me they cost that much?!?
Me: smacks forehead
Turns out, “it doesn’t matter how much they cost” means “I’m fine with any price that doesn’t exceed the arbitrary guesstimate I came up with”.
I’m genuinely curious where all of these nasty, soul-sucking Walmarts are located. I haven’t been in a dingy unorganized one in over ten years and the ones that were are the ones that were built 30 years or so ago.
I don’t know, but I have a similar problem with Aldi and Lidl. Does “being cheaper than other places” require having shelves that look like stuff has been tossed on them by a newspaper delivery boy and walls painted the yellow cousin of Hospital Green? Really?
They must be the only stores I know where chocolate doesn’t look attractive, no matter which brand. I’m so busy wanting to get out of there before I catch something that my lizard brain doesn’t have enough resources to go “hey, yummy over there!”