I purchased 10 tropical fish from PET SMART. Within 24 hours 8 of the ten were fin-up (the other 2 were M.I.A.s.) The fish were reduced from $3.99 to a dollar each. Since PET SMART has a two week guarantee I put the dead and nearly dead ones in a ziploc bag and set off to return them. As a side note, when Marianne was about seven I returned a two inch long Oscar to Wal-Mart. It was coming to the five day limit on returns of tropical fish and I knew he wasn't going to live (a fish swimming on his nose with eyes popped out is a bad sign) so I dispatched him with a few whacks and an hour in the sun. With barely an hour to spare it's off to Wally's for the refund. Marianne is next to me in the car holding the Oscar in a plastic bag when it starts flipping around. She starts screaming, so I reach over and grab the bag and slam the fish on the dashboard and hand it back to her. Needless to say the Oscar was sufficiently dead to qualify for a refund.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm in PET SMART and have my receipt signed by the salesperson for a return of eight fishes at a dollar each. It seems to be going well till the young lady gives me $4.30 back. I tell her I had eight fish at a dollar each and should get eight dollars back. She calls the manager and he pushes a few buttons and opens the register for her and leaves. Then this perky cashier hands me $36 and change. Meanwhile, the line behind is starting to wind back to the Veterinary Clinic. I tell her it's not right, and that she only owes me $4.00. The manager comes back, they look at the receipt, talk some more and then he leaves and she resumes working the register and eventually hands me $16 and change. She tells me "I refunded the other four fish at the $3.99 instead of the one dollar sale price." Now the line is starting to back up to Brevard so I'm thinking to myself maybe I should just take the sixteen plus the four dollars before somebody in this line sticks a shiv in me.
In my earlier life I would have just put the register on my shoulder and walked out. While I'm paused the manager comes by and looks at me, and I guess he sees the pained look on my face so he comes over and I take the $16 in my hand and put it down and then pull the first $4 out of my pocket and put it down and say "I just want eight dollars". He picks eight dollars out of the pile and hands it to me and says "I still owe you the tax", to which I reply "forget the tax". He tells the cashier "just put rest of the money back in the drawer, we will talk about it later". I felt really bad for the cashier as I drove home. Perhaps the mistakes would have flown under the radar, but now she was in deep doo-doo. She had a pretty smile, but boy was she dumb.
3 comments:
I heard a lady on the radio yesterday who teaches remedial math to college freshmen. She said the problem is none of these kids can do any math without a calculator. And she even had to put up a digital clock in the classroom because the kids are supposed to sign in with the time when they come in, and some of these kids couldn't read a clock with a big hand and a little hand!
I figure the little cashier looked at the numbers on the receipt and it might as well have been in Swahili.
My generation might just go down as the dumbest generation.
By the way, the fish story with Marianne is hilarious
She's really good at texting though.
When I was a cashier as a teenager, I used to play a little game of figuring out the amount of change before I looked at the register. I got really good at it.
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