Stupidity or Scam?
Elizabeth's birthday is fast approaching, so today we celebrated with some of her chums with a make-over party at Club Libby Lu. The event cost $21.50 for each girl that attended. When I booked the party, I left a $50.00 deposit. At the end, when it was time to pay I told the cashier how many girls there had been and reminded her that I had left a deposit.
The cashier didn't know what to do about the deposit. So, she flagged down another store employee. This second girl said that she should ring up the party with two less girls than had actually attended. I was a little surprised by this advice and pointed out that did not equal 50 dollars. The two women looked at me like a couple of deer caught in the headlights. So as politely and kindly as I could muster with a gaggle of girls waiting to go for their cake, I said "21.50 times two equals 43 dollars... it doesn't work if you just deduct two girls from the party."
I don't know if it was me repeating myself or the din of the girls, but they finally started whispering to each other. Then one of the employees went into the back room while the other employee apologized to me that it was taking so long. When employee #1 came back out, they resumed whispering and started pushing buttons on the cash register. After several minutes of this, they had to call the store manager. The three of them continued to fuss around with the cash register and whisper among themselves.
Finally, the manager announced they were going to total up the entire party and deduct $50.00 from the total. Pure genius!
We're going on ten hours since the end of the party and I still can't decide if they were trying to scam me out of the seven bucks... or if they were really that stupid. After all, at the end of the party the girls are bouncing of the walls with pure glee and the promise of cake. I could envision a lot of parents missing the fact that simply deducting two girls from the tab doesn't cover the full deposit. And I bet those seven bucks can rack up. But on the other hand, I once ran into a lady at Wendy's who couldn't make change when I gave her two bucks for my medium unsweetened iced tea.
posted by Liz at 12:36 AM
4 Comments:
I love stuff like that. I was at Home Depot on Friday, where my cashier resolved computer problems by striking the necessary key *harder*, then rapid-fire. When that didn't work (I imagined the compter laboring double-time to queue up commands...), she pulled both hands across the whole keyboard, Liberace style.
Happy Birthday to Elizabeth!
My guess is the employees were pocketing the extra as a "tip."
Oh, I definately believe that they were just that stupid. I worked at a pizza place in high school and you wouldn't believe how helpless some of my coworkers were. Anyway this may open a whole other can of worms, but I think it comes from teaching our children exactly what to do all the time so that they end up have no problem solving skills. These girls may not have been that bad with numbers, they just didn't know what to do if they couldn't follow the rules exactly as they learned them.
Yep. That stupid. Though you really would think that, if a deposit were always required, the powers that be would have a firmer, more well-known system in place for how to deal with it.
But I am always amazed when I encounter someone who is a) polite and b) competent around here. I'm not sure which I value more, really.
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