dek9 and her kids left following dinner, daisy_knotwise mentioned to me that we needed scouring pads and that either one of us could go get them. I volunteered.At the Jewel, they had the no-name pads, but right next to them they had the 3M Scotch Brite pads on sale with preferred card for $1.99, marked down from $2.95. "Cool!" I thought. "I'll buy two packs."
I decided to use the self-service checkout where, after I scanned my preferred card, the first pack scanned in at $2.95 with no subsequent deduction for "preferred card savings". Hmm. I signaled to the woman who was supervising the lines and told her that I wasn't getting the preferred card discount. She said to rescan the preferred card and try again, which I did with the second pack and got the same result.
She tried to find someone to get a price check without luck, so the two of us headed back to the aisle where she checked the sticker on the shelf which was for a sale that had ended August 25th. Drat!
Except, she explained, Jewel policy is that when an item is mismarked on the shelf, you get one free and the other at the marked sale price. Cool! So back to the automated checkout we went to discover that someone else had tried to use the machine, despite the fact that it was in the middle of another transaction. But their cake had been backed out and eventually we figured out where they'd put my pad, being too something to figure out that the machine was in use. Now they were being confused at a different automated checkout machine.
In the meantime, the helpful lady had backed out one of the two pads, but got grabbed to help the couple with the cake. I paid for the remaining pads, not noticing that the price on the second pack hadn't been adjusted down. Oops.
So off to the service desk we went. The lady there at first tried to give me a free pack of pads, but I already had that. Then she tried to give me a refund for two packs of pads at full price, which I explained that I couldn't accept, because she'd be giving me back too much money. The supervisor told her to cancel out the refund by ringing up two packs and putting the money back in.
Then she tried to figure out what I was owed, which was 96 cents plus tax, which she computed as being $1.22, which I was fairly sure wasn't correct. Finally, she refunded the $3.21 I'd paid for the second pack of pads.
"Now," I said, "I need to pay you for these at $1.99 plus tax."
"Take them," she replied. "They're free."
I concluded that it was probably time to go. Between my standing there looking like a husband who had been told "Go get cleaning supplies" by his wife late on a Labor Day evening and the general hilarity that had been involved in the transaction thus far, I think she didn't even want to think about how to ring these up at the adjusted price.
So I went home. And I told
daisy_knotwise, "I hope these are the right thing, because I'm certainly not going to be able to return them."Fortunately, they were.