Mar 10, 2009
The Daily Poverty Post.
This photo represents the two receipts Bossy accrued within two minutes yesterday, and all because she wasn’t paying attention.
Here’s what happened: Bossy and her friend Martha had walked to the local grocery store for ingredients to make a Girl Salad, which means stuff in it. They browsed the store for deals and found a bin with discounted romaine lettuce, only $0.25 a pound compared to the usual $3.49 for the bag.
Bossy and her friend Martha were all delighted at their find since both of them are on a budget and were splitting the cost of the ingredients. The only caveat? A sign on the bin saying it’s the customer’s responsibility to bring the sale item to the attention of the cashier.
So what does Bossy do? She marches straight up to the cashier and gets chatting and gets thinking and gets laughing and Bossy hands the cashier money and sort of counts her change and marches toward the door, which was when Martha was all, “Did you tell her about our sale lettuce?”
So Bossy got back in line and was reimbursed the difference in cost, which amounted to $2.92.
This is just careless on Bossy’s part, especially since moments before Bossy and her friend Martha stood in the produce aisle trying to decide if they could afford to splurge on an avocado.
A while back Bossy read an article about finances, where read an article probably means she saw it on Oprah. And the focus of the discussion was based around respect for money. If you don’t respect money, it won’t respect you back.
Bossy has been trying to respect money. Each new day she wakes with fresh optimism that perhaps this will be the day she’ll begin to truly care, and things like double-checking her receipts and counting her change will become second nature.
Sigh.
Rather sneaky of the store. I am getting better at checking that items are scanning at the correct sale price.
I worked at a grocery store for a long time. I ALWAYS check my receipts because of it; they are wrong A LOT.
Either the pricing isn’t in the system properly, or the cashier uses the wrong codes and I’ve found Wal Mart to be the worst. Every. Single. Time. I shop there I find an error on my slip.
/rant
hoo boy.
I am of the “do not care” ilk, and that needs to change. I am inspired by your continually renewed optimism!
I am glad you splurged and got the avocado. So worth it.
I’m trying to get in the habit of checking my grocery store receipts. I found big mistakes on my last two trips, and when I brought them to the attention of the store manager, he actually gave me one item for free and the other at a discount for my trouble. It’s worth the minute or two it takes, though it’s a hassle to try to remember the prices. These days I buy almost nothing that isn’t on some sort of discount so I can scan for the items that didn’t get a reduction, but last time I got charged for 2 packs of diapers when I only bought one and THAT was $10 I didn’t need to spend! What a pain…
I bought a globe for my son for Christmas. Thank god it was dented when we opened it up on Christmas morning. When I found the receipt to return it, I found I had been charged for it twice. The manager refunded me all the money and I bought a new undented globe. But had it not been dented, I never would have known I had been charged double.
My Cub Foods will give you the item for free if they mess up ringing it up. I heart that. And then I feel guilty for taking money out of their hands because I fear my cute check-out granny will get laid off.
Buck up Bossy! You DO respect money if you actually went back for the refund…not many people would bother. Congrats!
This is something I’m just learning myself. We shop at Smart & Final (like Costco without the fees) but the trade off is that things often get rung up wrong. (Probably because they’re always running new sales/specials.) The last trip we found we’d been charged an extra $10.50!
But, it’s an eerie feeling, standing in the Customer Service line at the grocery store… when did I become my mother?
Well COME ON… it’s the customer’s responsibility??
They need to stop screwing with your head that way.
Either it’s cheap or it’s not cheap. But why are they making you dance for it??
Yesterday I went to the grocery and spent $52, but saved $35. I’m pretty happy with those numbers.
It’s easy to respect money when you’re Oprah.
Had to make them ring it three times at the Rite-Aid Sunday before they got it right. Embarrassing to be that person with the coupons and the rebates that holds everybody up. Once you bless it and release it, though, the saving is all good.
In Michigan, we have a law that the store is required to get it right (after research which proved that the mistakes were ALWAYS in favor of the grocery store) – if you do check and find the mistake (I know, this is the important part), they owe you the difference and 10 times the difference, up to $5.00. So Bossy would have made 7,92 by showing respect money – though I’m still not sure what that really means. Respect? Really?
I read that same book on finances, where “read” equals “dropped out of accounting class and loathes anything remotely related to numbers, banking, credits, debits, receipts, assets, liabilities, numbers, going to the bank, cash flow machines, banking tellers, numbers, taking out the trash and more I HATE NUMBERS.”
But in spite of my disability, I usually do have a rough idea of what my total bill is going to be at checkout, and I actually am so OCD that I will even twist the screen around if it is not in my line of sight so that I can see what is being charged/overcharged. because I always assume they are overcharging because, well, paranoia.
I’ve got issues, conflicting issues, but it definitely pays to watch the ticket. Where ” pays” equals “the people in line behind you will pay you to hurry up and stop dickering over three cents.”
Still.
Yesterday I picked up prescriptions. As in, trying to stock up on drugs before hub loses his job and we have no insurance.
I was charged $40.00 for what was supposed to be “little houses”–the name brand. I got…Little circles-aka Generic. This was the second time.
I went back in. Pharmacist was dooly appalled but didn’t act all that surprised. What WAS shocking, is that it had happened before and I just let it go. If I was to get “generic” it was only TEN dollars. How many times do they Rip people off? I stood up for myself, and it felt good.
Don’t mess with a pre menopausal wench giving her cheap crap drugs that are NOT the same as the name brand thank you very much….
See, I did that last week at the very same store on some sale squash and forgot about it until I got home and then said, “FUGGEDABOUDIT” because I didn’t want to drive back there.
I once almost came to blows with a grocery cashier when she tried to charge me twice for a two-pack of English muffins. I don’t just respect money, I make it fear me.