Oh, I didn't want to pay that way

There are a many, many things at the Wal-Mart that make me cringe inside.

Howlers monkeys do it every time. Seeing an open CD or DVD. A burned out toaster. White trash. The piles of stuff we find every morning that's been stolen. The lines every weekend when I'm stranded alone at the Service Desk. Pickles. People walking in with dogs. Dead rose bushes. And I could go on.

But I live to serve.

Nothing makes me cringe more than when someone comes up with a huge long receipt and says some variation of "I paid with my credit card/check/EBT and I didn't want to pay that way. I wanted to pay (insert alternate method of payment here)."

This is just a nightmare. For the life of me, I don't UNDERSTAND.

IF YOU DID NOT WANT TO PAY THAT WAY WHY DID YOU HAND OVER YOUR CREDIT CARD, WRITE A CHECK OR SWIPE YOUR EBT CARD? WHY! WHY! WHY!

Once the transaction has been tendered and a receipt has been printed out, our options are VERY limited as to what we can do that won't take a huge amount of time. Take today.

This woman rolls up with a buggy overflowing with stuff. It could feed a family of six for a week and probably will. The total bill is pushing $150 and she said that she "accidentally" slid her credit card instead of her EBT card. Now she wants to pay with her EBT card. **SIGH**

But I live to serve.

Try not to cry inside. Walk around and get the chair from the hiring computer. Call for help. Explain what happened to supervisors. Explain to idiot woman that this is going to be awhile.

And then I sit down and start to work.

There are two options here. One is to have someone either go void the transaction, in which case I have to take all her stuff out of the bags and then re-scan it all. Or I can return it all by typing it in line by line off the receipt, one ten-digit UPC at a time, all $150 of it, and then re-sell it to her, again line-by-line. (Although I have a shortcut for that - print out defective tags for everything as you return it, then just scan the defect slips. Works like a charm.)

Tell idiot woman that no, I can't just "scan" the receipt and magically charge her all over again. IT DON'T WORK THAT WAY!

Either way, I've either got to type it all in or unpack and repack the whole buggy. As fast as I can type punch numbers, and with the limited keyboard space I have, typing is faster.

Anyway. I start work. I type and I type and I type. The woman starting to guess that she would have been better off just leaving. Yeah you stupid cow, if I've got to do all this work, you're going to stand there and have everyone look you right in the back and know that you're the reason they're having to wait in line.

But I live to serve.

I miss the return mark by two cents because I screw up the price of ribs. It's not worth re-doing the whole thing. I come up short on the recharge by 76 cents because I think I missed a can of evaporated milk somewhere. It's close enough for me and it's not an overcharge. I tell her to slide the EBT card and she's done.

I'm nearly cross-eyed. She's unhappy but I don't really care. She's finally figured out that I'm not a happy camper for doing all this, and she probably would have been better off just letting it go — it's not like she couldn't have spent the rest of the EBT balance in the rest of the month.

But I live to serve.

Even better are the ASSOCIATES who make us do the same thing for Tire & Lube Express transactions when they forget to slide their discount card. Those are truly evil. Associate stupidity should not be my fault. Hell, customer stupidity should not be my fault.

But I live to serve.