Sunday At Wal-Mart

The family and I were doing some shopping at Wal-Mart on Sunday. I fear going to Wal-Mart on Sundays because there are so many shoppers but needed to buy food for Baby and a new collar for the cat. We got lucky and found a register that only had a couple of people waiting with small amounts of merchandise in their carts. After the woman scanned all my merchandise, I presented to her a manufacturer’s $10 off coupon for the baby formula. Actually, it was a “retail check” and not a coupon. I guess it’s a check because some stores don’t accept coupons. When she took the “check”, she looked at it and then walked away from the register without saying a word. I was perplexed, as well as the gentleman behind me, who only had 4 items to buy. That’s when I noticed that there were about 5 or 6 others now waiting in line at this register and they’re all staring at me.

After an uncomfortable 5 minutes (really, I’m not kidding; we could have walked out of the store without paying) the woman returns and says to me that I have to go with her towards the back of the store if I want the formula. I said you already scanned and bagged it. She looked confused and then went through our bags to find the formula and then looked even more confused. I believe she thought the “check” was a coupon for discounted baby food provided to needy families by the state with my tax dollars. I told her it was basically a “check” for $10 dollars. She then called for a supervisor to help her and that took another couple of minutes.

The woman now proceeds to input the “check” for the amount of $10 but she obviously got confused and entered the “check” amount for the full purchase price. So once again the supervisor had to come and intervene. The Wal-Mart receipt has a barcode on the bottom so I would think all she would have to do is scan that to recover all the items but that was wishful thinking. She had to enter the store codes for all 32 items I purchased to generate another sale on the register. I kept looking back at the grumbling people behind me and tried to make them understand that it wasn’t my fault they had to wait. After around a 20 minute delay just to pay, I was free to leave with my purchases. I LOVE shopping at Wal-Mart!