What would you do if, in the course of honest shopping, you got home with something you didn't pay for? Perhaps you carried a dozen plants to the check-out and upon arriving home you discovered you were charged for only six. Or you put four bundles of plastic containers in your cart and discovered you were charged for only two. Or at an elegant jewelry shop you bought Lennox china on sale and discovered upon checking your receipt that an error was made in your favor. Would you go back to the store to make it right? Over the years the above scenarios have happened to me.
Saturday afternoon I stopped by Jo-Ann's Fabric Store. I've been lazy about getting into another sewing project, coming off a less than satisfactory experience and not quite sure what to make next. So I bought a yard of fabric to make a sundress for a little girl I know and 3 ¾ yards of a sheer to make a cover-up, or over-blouse, for myself. The sheer was on the markdown shelf at $2.00 per yard. By trying the pattern on a markdown, I will have something I can use if I like it but won't be out so much if I don't. I checked out and came home.
But it bothered me. The amount I paid just didn't seem enough. So, I sat down with pen and paper and added it all up. It took me a while to see that the markdown fabric was listed on the receipt as "regular price $7.50," which certainly looked odd, and it did not transfer to the totals column. Mike and I discussed the error and decided I should return to the store with my receipt and explain the problem. I had misgivings: this is the same retailer that couldn't figure out how to refund my credit card on a return, so they gave me cash; the same retailer that charged me for two packs of expensive needles when I bought only one.
The first cashier I approached was inexperienced and unable to handle the issue. (Why was I not surprised?) She called for another associate, the same one that had cut the fabric for me the previous day. Grabbing a calculator, she carefully added the figures in the totals column and agreed with my conclusion – I hadn't paid for the sheer fabric. In conversation I mentioned perhaps the difficulty was with their system. "Yes," the associate said, "we own the system – for good or bad." In the end, they gave me half off the total in appreciation for letting them know. I'm not sure they appreciated it.
"If I hadn't gone in with you," Mike said, "I wouldn't have believed it could take so long. I would have wondered what you were doing in there." Yeah – what would I be doing in Jo-Ann's? KW
3 comments:
I went to JoAnn's once and the person in front of me was buying sale items where the decimal point wasn't coming up in the system. We were all fairly certain that the $24,000 total was wrong.
Over the years I've gotten home with cases of pop & multiple packages of diapers that I was never charged for. When I tried to pay they just laughed it off to "checker error" and let me keep the stuff. But I have paid for lots of stuff that never made it home with me too, a whole grocery sack of frozen food one time but I was able to go back and retrieve it.
Frankly I thought Jo-Ann's should have let me have that fabric, especially since it was on clearance. Now once I took Mother to the old PayLess store for diabetic supplies and the pharmacist charged her only half enough -- $30 instead of $60. She told me before we left the store, we went back, and the pharmacist was most appreciative and gave her a discount. He said the store couldn't afford such errors. I believed that.
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