lo que habia sucedido fue que…

Posted by beth on January 14, 2009

That’s Spanish, y’all, for “what had happened was that…,” and here it is.

Last night, I got off work at 9:30. I was tired, and I wanted to go home to bed, but I needed a bottle of water and some Luna bars, so I decided to make a quick run into Kroger. I cannot explain to you the level of addiction I have for these Luna bars. I get the Chocolate Raspberry ones, and since I love them so much, and since I eat one for breakfast every day, I’ve taken to just buying the whole box of them. You know, the big box they come in. The one the store rips the top off and sets on the shelf for display. You buy them individually. The box isn’t meant for resale, but it keeps them neater in my cabinet, so I like to have it. Plus, when I get the box, the cashier knows right away that I’m buying fifteen of them. There’s no need to scan them all or even to count. You just have to scan one and do it times fifteen. Easy, right? Nope.

So I arrived at the checkout counter. Normally, I would do self-checkout, but you have to scan every individual item and place it in the bag there, and I thought it would be faster just to let the cashier scan one Luna bar and multiply it by fifteen. Again, I was wrong. Areb, the night cashier, scanned the barcode on the bottom of the display box. I don’t know why the display box had a barcode on it at all, but the price that rang up was not at all the same as the price of fifteen individual Luna bars. Plus, they were on sale, and no discount came up, so I inquired.

“Did that catch the discount for the Kroger card?” says I.
“No, there’s no discount,” says Areb, looking at the computer screen. “These are not on sale.”
“Well, there are signs back there saying that they’re 4 for $5.”

At this point, Areb took the whole box back to the section where I’d found it. I don’t know what he was doing back there, but it took him a while to come back. When he did come back, although he “didn’t see” a sale sign for those particular bars, he gave me the benefit of the doubt, took one out of the box and scanned it. It rang up $1.39 with a $0.14 discount (thus making each bar $1.25 or 4 for $5).

Now, if I were Areb, I would have, at this juncture, multipled that scan by fifteen and voided the original scanning of the box. But no. Areb got out a pencil and paper and multipled $0.14 by 15. This comes to $2.10. He then gave me a $2.10 discount off the price of the box, which, as you’ll recall, was not the correct price for fifteen individual, originally-priced bars. I couldn’t call him on it, though, because I wasn’t 100% sure of the math, and I didn’t want to be a jerk if I was wrong. So I got out the gift card my sweet daddy gave me for Christmas, and I swiped it through the machine.

It didn’t work. I swiped it again. And again. And again. Areb took it, placed it inside a plastic bag and swiped it (covered in plastic bag) NUMEROUS TIMES. It didn’t work. It still had plenty of money on it to cover the balance. The strip just wasn’t working. Or the machine. I’m not sure which. Anyhoe, the manager came over and made it work.

Now for the fun part.

I owed about $21, and the card had more than enough money on it to cover that, but when it went through and the receipt began to print, that’s when the interrogation began.

Areb, with accusation painted all over his face like a creepy circus clown’s star-shaped tear, looked at me and said, “How can you have $21 on this card? It can only have $15 on it.”

Confused, I replied, “It had at least $30 on it before. I’ve used it a few times, but it still had at least $30 on it.”

He was not persuaded. Again, looking at me as though I’d just stolen his kids’ college funds, he said, “You can’t have $30 dollars on it. It’s a Kroger gift card. It only had $15. ARE YOU A KROGER EMPLOYEE?”

Um…excuse me? I just said, “No,” sort of hurt and confused, and a little scared that he was going to follow me out to the parking lot to make sure I didn’t steal his car too, and I left.

When I got in the car, I did the math. I did it again when I got home. He’d only overcharged me by about $2, but the experience was enough to make me want my $2 (and my 30 minutes) back. It was not enough to make me attach skis to my bike and ride down a black diamond slope to get it, but it was enough to make me go to Kroger after work today and talk to a manager about it. He did the math with me, apologized and gave me another gift card with $5 on it. Hey, I can get four Luna bars with that!