Of Course!

This is typical for me.

I decided to pop out of the office around 11AM to go to Stop and Shop and pick up what I need to make cookies for a party I am going to on Saturday night (they involve Fluff, marschino cherries and melted white chocolate….jealous?). I was also going to pick up a few frozen meals since this sista will have no time to cook anytime soon and also pick up a bag of frozen fries for the much aggrieved Adam who could NOT believe I bought chicken nuggets for him last week but no fries. Chicken nuggets with fries, he says, are a meal. Chicken nuggets with no fries, are just a snack. Who knew?

Anyway this whole shopping trip was to take 10-15 minutes. Wham Bam Here’s my Stop and Shop Card Thank You Ma’am. But of course this time of year? No shopping trip is an easy venture no matter how innocent at first it may seem.

For one thing, when I arrived the parking lot was PACKED! Which struck me as odd for 11AM on a Thursday but hey, maybe smart minds think alike. I didn’t pay as much attention to the three white busses parked out front as I should have but alas, it was apparently field trip day for a few local nursing homes. That is fine, I am glad they get out to get their groceries. But it does make quickly maneuvering around a supermarket difficult as a lot of these folks just park their carts in the middles of the aisle and meander up and down. Yikes. And since there was already an abnormally high number of shoppers, slowed me down quite a bit. But I summoned my holiday spirit, smiled, and was even able to smile and power through. No big deal.

Then I get to the check out and the lines are obscene, except for the self checkout which is empty. Which makes sense since I don’t think anyone over 75 even knows what self check out is. So I swing over there and begin scanning my 8 or so items through. Beep! Beep! ERROR A STORE EMPLOYEE WILL BE WITH YOU MOMENTARILY”. Ah technical difficulties, how I love you. So a store employee comes over to help me with the persnickety self checkout scanner and within a few seconds of her leaving it starts happening again BEEP! ERROR! A STORE EMPLOYEE WILL BE WITH YOU MOMENTARILY”. And every time I scan something I have to run down and bag it since this machine is clearly not having me. But the lines in the other checkout spots are so long it seems worth it just to deal with it although I get the impression the people waiting in the long lines are watching my ordeal thinking “That right there is why I don’t use self checkout!”.

So once I get everything scanned I swipe my card and punch in my pin and so on and it doesn’t even occur to me that the amount seems kind of high until I am all paid and on my way out. I double check my receipt and lo, I was charged twice for about half of the things in my bag.

Now, a person more aware of the way their luck is going might have just eaten the $6 but I could just not stomach it so, seeing there was only one person in line at Customer Service, I made my way over their receipt in hand.

The fellow in front of me was there to pick up his paycheck and was (of course!) having a very tough time with it. He had a difficult to pronounce last name, and no ability to write it out for the customer service attendant. Which resulted in her thumbing threw her bin of paychecks several times in a row, holding up different ones asking him if that was his check. Seriously. And the fellow is getting more and more irate, the woman more flustered, and me? I am on my blackberry texting Adam to kill me now but maintaining a quite serene outward appearance if I do say so myself.

After five minutes of waiting, I reached the threshold. DO you know this threshold? You are waiting in line for something and it’s the point when you have to weigh how much longer you are willing to wait in line with how long you have already BEEN waiting in line, taking into consideration what exactly you are waiting for. Was waiting in line more than 5 minutes worth $6?

I pondered this as the man waiting for his check started yelling and decided, heck yeah it was. His yelling brought forth a manager. And with that manager, a resolution (for the curious, his paycheck was filled out first name, last name instead of last name, first name as all the others were. Sweet resolution!!! With that I skipped up to the desk gleefully to claim my $6……and was told I was only getting $3 back since I had miscalculated.

D’oh! That would only have been worth it if I had waited 2.5 minutes..if you do my math correctly.