Economy

This happened just a few weeks go.

I usually shop early in the morning to avoid crowds and heat, but the store I usually go to rarely has a live cashier before 8:00 a.m. so I'm often left with just U-Scan, as it's called.

I didn't have a whole lot of items that day: some produce, ice cream, a few other things, and a jar of pepperoncini peppers. I went through the standard self-checkout, chatting with the supervising cashier while doing so. There were no problems, and I know most of the codes for the produce. Our conversation was friendly and person -- I've been shopping there for a long time -- with nothing out of the ordinary. I paid, bagged my groceries, put the bags in the cart, and left.

When I arrived at my car to put the groceries in, I discovered I had never scanned and paid for the jar of peppers. I checked my receipt just to make sure, and nope, I had missed them because they rolled to the back of the cart under the child seat where my purse had been resting. So I stashed my groceries in the car, took the jar of peppers back into the store to pay for them.

It was harder to explain to the cashier what had happened -- no, they weren't left in the cart by a previous shopper; yes, they're mine; yes, I missed them; yes, I want to pay for them -- and then deal with her surprise than it probably would have been to just toss the damn things in one of the other bags and drive home with a free jar of peppers.

Don't want to pay for the expensive organic tomatoes? Key in the code for the cheaper Romas and no one knows the difference. Same with apples. It happens all the time. My local Kroger chain outlet virtually requires the cashiers to scan all produce codes rather then key them in because yes, even the cashiers are cheating. Maybe just for friends or family or favorite customers, but yeah, it's rampant. And I suspect it's now so ingrained in the culture that even raising wages to something approaching livable for so many low-income people won't root it out.

It's too bad, I guess, that the big retailers are now feeling the pinch for so much of their inventory being, well, pinched. Maybe they should have thought about the consequences a long time ago.