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I have nothing against the food stamp program. It helps people who might otherwise go hungry. Some people waste it on junk food, but you can't hold everyone's hand and force them to eat right. The Store probably wouldn't even be in business if not for food stamps - we're located in a not-particularly-high-income part of town, and at the beginning of the month food stamps account for more than half of our sales.
What I do have a problem with is people who try to cheat the system. Like the subject of this tale.
It's shortly after midnight. I'm in a register backing up the graveyard cashier (because for some reason, an alarming number of people seem to think that midnight on a school night is the perfect time to drag the kids to the store and do your shopping for the week.) Customer comes through with an order of about $150 worth of stuff, pays for it with EBT, the transaction goes through, all is well.
About half an hour later, I'm off the register and am stocking the soda aisle when we get a page for a supervisor to the front. I'm the closest, so I take it. It's the same customer I rang up earlier, she has a bagful of the same stuff she bought earlier, and she's decided she doesn't want it after all. So I run it all through as a return, about $30 worth, and ask her to swipe her food stamp card so I can refund it.
Suddenly, she doesn't have her food stamp card with her. Even though it was in her possession half an hour ago. Can't I just do the refund in cash? Anyone who's worked in grocery knows this is a big no-no - EBT purchases can only be refunded back to the same EBT card they came from, and that's a matter of law, not just store policy. You can't trade food stamps for cash, period. I tell her so and she says she'll go to her car and try and find the card.
I wait.
She comes back and still doesn't have the card. "I just need the cash for gas", she says at this point. Sorry. No can do. My job isn't worth your gas money. She decides to just take the food anyway, and I end up having to cancel out the return and write nearly a paragraph on the cancel receipt explaining it for the satisfaction of the bookkeeper.
Don't know if she had planned all along to try and get cash out of us, or if she merely absent-mindedly realized after driving to the store that she didn't have gas money, but it doesn't really matter.
Bonus: This isn't mine. I think I'll throw it on the floor!
It's not like shopping carts are hard to come by at our store. We have about 500-700 carts in our possession at any given time, and we're constantly ordering more to make up for carts that are damaged, lost, or stolen. The cart room at the entrance is larger than some people's homes and it's almost always got plenty to spare, especially late at night.
So it absolutely boggles the mind that, when I went back to the aisle I was stocking after dealing with the above fiasco, I discovered that all the broken-down cardboard boxes from the freight I'd worked had been tossed on the floor in a big sloppy pile, and the shopping cart I had previously interred them in was nowhere to be seen.
Not the first time that one's happened, either.
What I do have a problem with is people who try to cheat the system. Like the subject of this tale.
It's shortly after midnight. I'm in a register backing up the graveyard cashier (because for some reason, an alarming number of people seem to think that midnight on a school night is the perfect time to drag the kids to the store and do your shopping for the week.) Customer comes through with an order of about $150 worth of stuff, pays for it with EBT, the transaction goes through, all is well.
About half an hour later, I'm off the register and am stocking the soda aisle when we get a page for a supervisor to the front. I'm the closest, so I take it. It's the same customer I rang up earlier, she has a bagful of the same stuff she bought earlier, and she's decided she doesn't want it after all. So I run it all through as a return, about $30 worth, and ask her to swipe her food stamp card so I can refund it.
Suddenly, she doesn't have her food stamp card with her. Even though it was in her possession half an hour ago. Can't I just do the refund in cash? Anyone who's worked in grocery knows this is a big no-no - EBT purchases can only be refunded back to the same EBT card they came from, and that's a matter of law, not just store policy. You can't trade food stamps for cash, period. I tell her so and she says she'll go to her car and try and find the card.
I wait.
She comes back and still doesn't have the card. "I just need the cash for gas", she says at this point. Sorry. No can do. My job isn't worth your gas money. She decides to just take the food anyway, and I end up having to cancel out the return and write nearly a paragraph on the cancel receipt explaining it for the satisfaction of the bookkeeper.
Don't know if she had planned all along to try and get cash out of us, or if she merely absent-mindedly realized after driving to the store that she didn't have gas money, but it doesn't really matter.
Bonus: This isn't mine. I think I'll throw it on the floor!
It's not like shopping carts are hard to come by at our store. We have about 500-700 carts in our possession at any given time, and we're constantly ordering more to make up for carts that are damaged, lost, or stolen. The cart room at the entrance is larger than some people's homes and it's almost always got plenty to spare, especially late at night.
So it absolutely boggles the mind that, when I went back to the aisle I was stocking after dealing with the above fiasco, I discovered that all the broken-down cardboard boxes from the freight I'd worked had been tossed on the floor in a big sloppy pile, and the shopping cart I had previously interred them in was nowhere to be seen.
Not the first time that one's happened, either.
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