COLUMN: And Have a Nice Day

By Tobin Barnes
My wife was shopping at one of the big-box retailers recently. She was just trying to breeze in and breeze out, picking up five or six items. She was wearing a knee brace because of an injury, so walking and standing were difficult for her.

She’d gone through checkout, paid for her stuff, and was heading out the door when an alarm sounded.

Now that’s embarrassing right there.

So she stops in the entranceway while the store “greeter” compulsively goes through her bag over and over again checking the items against the receipt. The greeter has morphed from a glad-hander into airport security agent.

This all takes time. The guy’s elderly. Meanwhile people are passing by, thinking who knows what.

But the greeter just can’t figure it out. Everything in the bag is accounted for on the receipt. Nevertheless, he won’t give up.

My wife’s knee is hurting. She tells him, “If this is going to take longer, I’m going to go sit down.” She goes to take a seat in the nearby shop. Tells him to come get her when he’s done.

Finally, he figures it out. One item evidently didn’t scan properly even though it showed up on the receipt and was paid for. It’s like who knows with those gizmos?

Evidently, the scanner normally turns off the alarm function or something. This time it didn’t.

Anyway, after what seems like twenty minutes, the greeter hands over the items, and my wife says, “This is embarrassing!” to the guy.

His response?

“Have a nice day.” That’s it.

In other words, at these prices, you’re going to have to lump it. And she WILL lump it. She just hopes this article won’t get her banned from the store.

And no doubt the prices are great. I once read that when a big box, like Best Buy, Walmart or Home Depot, comes into your town, it’s like getting a pay raise.

I’ve also read that the big boxes are major targets for rip-offs by coordinated crime rings. Mark Doyle, president of a security consulting firm, says that “brazen thieves will wheel out dollies loaded with appliances, cases of liquor or, in one recent instance, an entire sectional sofa.”

Granted, but come on. How about all the cameras? How about all the associates behind one-way mirrors and stuff?

Not long after my wife’s incident, I ran across an article posted on Smartmoney.com. It’s where I got the above quote. It seems other big box customers are also upset with the “cough up the receipt” and “let’s see if the scanner made a mistake” policies.

The article started with the story of a middle-aged CPA living in small-town America who was convicted of misdemeanor assault after a multi-day trial that had his town abuzz.

So what did mild-mannered Casper Milquetoast do? He shoved a 75-year-old greeter who wouldn’t let him leave without examining his receipt.

“He didn’t have the right to make me do that,” he told the local paper.

This was the talk of the town because many people have shared his experience of bopping into a store for a thing or two and feeling like Homeland Security was on their case. Evidently, people aren’t enjoying being suspects until proven otherwise.

“You shouldn’t be required to sacrifice your dignity to get a better deal,” says a Sanford, Maine, web designer. After seeing a fellow customer going through the doorway mill, he put up a website to generate protest against receipt checks. The site has had 130,000 hits.

John DeArmond, “a nuclear engineer turned trucker turned retired Tennessee mountain man,” takes a more direct approach. He “insists that the checker compare every single item in his grocery cart against the receipt. (He's got a lot of free time.) Once, as a sort of grand finale, he marched his cart back to the service counter and returned the entire load.”

Another guy, Michael Righi from Brooklyn, Ohio, has had 200 supporters contribute to his defense fund after he was arrested for causing a stir when he refused to produce his receipt at the door a of big box store.

Next thing you know, receipt rebels will be building bonfires in the parking lot.