Over the weekend, I was wandering through a store and came across some undies that were clearanced out to 3/$9.99. Pretty good as they were originally $20+/pair. I found three I liked, made sure each had the black x on the tag denoting their clearance status and headed up to checkout.
The saleswoman rang them up and two rang up properly and the third rang up at $7.50 so she told me my total was $18. Actually, no. So I showed her that they were supposed to be the sale price and she tried to ring them up again. Same thing happened. She called an employee from lingerie and thought she had figured it out. Rang them up again, price adjusted the third and made them all ring up at $3.99. Close but still not there. I was tempted to just suck up the extra few dollars but had visions of my aunt in my heading saying why would you pay more than you're supposed to so I pressed on. Said that ringing up at $4/pair did not equal 3 for $10. She called the other girl up from lingerie and the girl looked at them, saw how they were ringing up and said it must have been an oversight in entering the one price into the computer, adjust her total to $10. The original employee didn't quite get the adjust the total part so she starts taking down the misbehaving pair of underwear $1 at a time. She stops midway through that and says no, I can't do that, I'll have to make the last pair less than $2. I'm still standing there, unperturbed, just not willing to pay more than I'm supposed to. The girl from lingerie is getting irritated and keeps telling her to just adjust the total. I finally pipe up and say that if it's 3/$9.99, she could just make each pair $3.33 and that would solve the problems. She doesn't want to do that and finally the lingerie girl leaned over the counter and was jabbing at the screen showing her how to adjust the total. She entered $9.99 in the total section of the screen and then my total to pay showed up as $9.60. How, I do not know. Now. $9.99 plus sales tax should have made my total around $10.60. I was looking at the computer screen trying to figure out what had happened when the employee threw her hands up, said 'close enough', and shot me a look of doom. So then I figured I'd just keep my mouth shut.
Rather trivial yes but it was amazing to me later how dependent on the computer she was (and we all are). Even though she could see the promotion, she had another employee telling her what the correct price should be, she still kept saying but the computer says it's X. Yes, but the computer can be wrong sometimes, especially if there's an oversight in price entering as the other employee stated.
I fought the computer and I won!
And now I own contraband undies.
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