SHOULD WE REALLY BE HONEST?
A while back I went to buy some shelving for the closets in the house at home Depot during a remodeling project. I'd already budget priced everything and knew I was looking at $1,000 or so. I had $200-$300 of other items to purchase so when they rung it up at $1,060 I shrugged and thought, guess it was cheaper than I had first thought. I drove across the highway to eat lunch. While eating I went over the receipt. They had obviously neglected to scan all of the items and not charged me enough. Now, I'll say I'm a honest man, basically, most of the time, sorta. If it was a CVO memmber, or an individual, I'd do the right thing and bring it to their attention. But, this is Home Depot. They own the big box stores. They put little ma and pa lumber yards out of business. They're owned by greedy stockholders. F**k em. I drove off. Within a mile, I turned around and went back. The more I thought about it, I left again. At the same spot in the road, again, I went back. I was struggling with "what's the right thing". Obviously if I kept going back and forth, it was bothering me. So I go back in. Here's where it gets interesting.
I tell the floor manager what happened. She looked at me, WOW, there is STILL honest people in this world. THAT made me feel good for doing the right thing. She told a young kid to go out to my truck and write down the 1,000 digit bar code of every item I purchased, (the items were too large to take back off the truck easily), bring the list back to the customer service desk and instruct her to "re-ring" the entire order and give me a 10% discount for my honesty. When he passes this info on to the woman behind the counter she looks at me very puzzled. HOW am I supposed to do this? Lady, I just shop here, I don't know. Her and the manager go into a pow-wow. They have come up with a plan. First they give me a credit on EVERYTHING listed on my receipt. It was over a foot long. She had to manually key in every bar code item until it matched up exactly. They have a few rules about giving out credit to customers. First, they don't give cash back, they put it on a credit card for store credit. Before she can give me the card though, she has to have proof of ID.
"blink" You're kidding me, right? All I'm trying to do is pay you for the items you didn't originally charge me for. Yes, sir, I understand that, but, we have rules. So, under protest, I show her ID. She had to call the manager back to "OK" and sign off on the store credit because it was over $1,000. Then she keys all of the items back into the computer plus the original items they'd forgotten. Then, she took the 10% off. I handed her the store credit card, and I owed a difference of $75. I had the cash, but decided I wanted to write a check. Since I'd just signed for a $1,000 credit, my name is highlighted & blackballed everytime I go in a HomeDepot now. The manager had to approve the check.
Look lady, I know you have a job to do and your hands are tied, but do you think I drove back to your store to alert you of your mistake, so I could write you a cold check after 2 hours of this BS, so you could send me to jail?


Seriously!
Next time this happens to me, do you think I've driving back?