I've been shopping at this Grocery Outlet for somewhere around ten years. I usually come here once,…read moreoften twice a month. My complaint isn't with the offerings and I'm pretty tolerant of the shabby customer service from the increasingly surly young women working there as cashiers.
But tonight's experience was so obnoxious, I wanted to warn other customers and encourage them to shop at one of the many other Grocery Outlets in the area.
I went up to the counter and greeted the young lady.
(Silence)
I had half a dozen items in my cart and a six-gallon pack of water. I asked her if she needed one of the bottles to scan. She looked the other direction and waved her hand at me like I was a fly buzzing around her head. She totaled everything up and I paid.
As I started to walk away, she said "Wait! I didn't ring up the water. My bad."
Okay, fine, you're treating me like crap, you've made an entirely avoidable mistake after I offered to help you, but hey, no problem.
So she rings up the water and tells me the total - it was over $30!!!
I said, "No, I don't think that's right." She pointed to the screen like I was an idiot. I said, "Wait, you're charging me $1.49 CRV per bottle?!? That should be something like ten cents per bottle, shouldn't it? Did the state recently raise the CRV? And Crystal Geyser is only $1.39 per bottle. How could six bottles of water cost thirty bucks?"
She told me with absolute certainty (and more than a little impatience) that was the correct total adding "It costs that much everywhere!"
So I said, "Okay, well, I'll just put it back because I can't afford five dollars a bottle for water." So I put it on another case of water where the display read, "Crystal Geyser, $1.39/gallon." I wished her a good night and she just scowled at me as she rang for a manager. I got as far as the shopping carts outside when I saw the manager approach.
So I went back in and asked, in all sincerity, "Did the CRV really go up to $1.49 per plastic bottle? That's more than the water itself." At first the manager took the young lady's side and I said, "Okay, this is news to me" before she corrected herself to say the young woman rang me up for an entirely different case of 24 bottles and the CRV for THAT was $1.49 for the case. She then told me the Crystal Geyser was $1.39 before adding "Plus ten cents per bottle, so that's $1.49 out the door!"
I replied, "Yeah, I know. You two have a nice evening!"
No apology, no sign of regret for treating me - inexplicably - like I'm a moron and not an ounce of humility for such a glaringly stupid mistake! At what point did people give up all semblence of critical thinking skills that they would be supremely confident a bottle of water costs as much as a gallon of gas?!? At no point did this young lady even consider that a mistake had been made. She just glared at me like I was the problem.
My hand to Christ, I don't want to complain! I don't! And as someone who has worked as a public servant for 40+ years, I'm very tolerant of service workers who are a little unfriendly because, hey, we all have bad days, right?
But f*** me! You want to first treat me with indifference, then with annoyed arrogance and then you have the audacity to try to convince me water costs five bucks?
I blame this sort of intellectual bankruptcy on Trump. We're becoming a nation where not only do the simplest of facts not matter, but critical thinking skills have been replaced with smug, fact free narratives where something is true as long as someone wants it to be true.
