stevesbets

I was walking home from Chipotle when I decided to swing by the grocery store on my corner to get some Mint Milanos (note to Mcdonalds and pepperidge farm, i take payment for blog product placement). The cashiers at this store are particularly incompetent so I wasn’t thrilled when I saw the woman in the only open lane struggling with a debit card. The customer was this little Asian woman that barely spoke English who was buying about 20 dollars worth of groceries.

She swiped her card, entered her pin and picked up the bags to go when the cashier stopped her and was like, ma’am there was only 3.14 on there, you have to pay the rest. The Asian woman said, 3.14, ok i pay 3.14. Cashier was like, nooo, you need to pay 16.73, there was only 3.14 on the card. At this point I noted that the card was unlike anything I had ever seen before, I have no idea what sort of debit card it was, but it wasn’t a usual one issued by a bank. The Asian woman responds (in a way that indicates no surprise or sadness), “i need this (pointing to like 14 dollars in her wallet) for taxi, I just take this one (and grabs one of her 3 bags)”. The cashier says “ma’am it doesnt work that way, you can’t just take a random bag of groceries for 3 dollars”. The Asian woman looked confused as the cashier called over 2 other workers to try to figure out how to deal with the dilemma.

At this point a couple options were running through my head:

1) watch the debacle, assume I’m going to be wasting the next 30 minutes of my life, and hope to come away with an interesting story
2) leave my mint milanos there and just go home. There was no movement by another clerk to open another register so I would certainly be waiting awhile if I wanted to buy them.
3) Be kind (but also kind of selfish to save time) and buy the woman her groceries so that the cashiers would not have to accomplish the impossible (for them) task of figuring out how to back her groceries out of the register.

What would you do?

I went with option 3. The oddest part of the story is, after I offered to pay, the clerks were visibly happy that they wouldn’t have to figure out how to remedy the situation. The Asian woman on the other hand collected her groceries without even looking back and walked out as if she expected someone would eventually take care of her. I suppose since my act was partially selfish, I shouldn’t expect any expression of thanks, but nonetheless another experience that I doubt will be repeated.