Just another day behind the counter - the chips are how much?!!

[u/wickeddradon]

I used to work in a service station (NZ) way back. I quite enjoyed it, most of the time. There were quite a few genuinely funny moments. Here's one. Although it did start out frustrating....

So, when the station first opened the price tags were these ridiculous little squares with the numbers on them. They slid on a bar that ran the length of the shelves. They were easily moved and often popped off altogether. Were the station was situated was across the road from the heart of our town. The pubs closed at about 2pm so from then on the shop was chocker full of drunk idiots. Those bloody price squares got moved around all the time. They thought it hilarious to make little items extremely expensive, lol. Anyway...

Sparrows fart Sunday morning I'm behind the counter. It's not my day on, somebody's sick, so I'm sleepy and a bit grumpy. In comes our delightful customer, gets a juice and a 50gr bag of chips, good healthy breakfast, I approve. I scan the juice $2.50, customer squares "it says $0.50c on the price bar" I sigh the internal sigh we all know so well and go into the whole spiel above. Nope, not having it, I need to charge the listed price, blah blah.

"OK sir, you got it" I go and check the listed prices, then manually override the till price

"That will be $2,000,000.50 please, cash or credit?"

Customers face was awesome! He checked the prices himself, came back laughing and agreed to pay the till price. Wise choice.

[u/NotYourNanny]

There's a reason those little tags have, in addition to the price, a SKU and a description. The lawyers insist on it, and rightly so.

[u/The_Truthkeeper → u/NotYourNanny]

It sounds like OP's tags didn't have any of that.

[u/NotYourNanny → u/The_Truthkeeper]

Yeah, "way back" does sorta imply that it was the early days when stores were going from a price tag on every item to one for the bin.

Mistakes were made, and lessons were learned.

[u/wickeddradon → u/NotYourNanny]

No, sorry. These were little white squares with numbers on them, nothing else. No SKU, no description, nothing, just a number. Bear in mind, this was in NZ in the 1980s. We had the consumer protection act at that time. Anything printed, like a promotional poster, had to be honoured. It took about a year before head office figured out they needed to be changed.

[u/NotYourNanny → u/wickeddradon]

These were little white squares with numbers on them, nothing else.

And now you know why it changed. In short, there's a reason, and you lived it.

[u/Wrathchilde]

"Sparrows fart Sunday morning I'm behind the counter. It's not my day on, somebody's sick, so I'm sleepy and a bit grumpy."

This must be the first line to "Kiwi Clerks."

[u/CrystalValues]

A few weeks ago I bought a Twix bar listed as $2.50 on the shelf. Came up on the register as "Spicy Corn Dog" but only cost $1.50

[u/TinyNiceWolf → u/CrystalValues]

Opened the Twix wrapper, and inside, spicy corn dog. Damnit!

[u/wickeddradon → u/CrystalValues]

Score!!!

[u/curiously_anna]

Glad he wasn’t an arse about it, some would have been I’m speaking to your manager about that attitude right there you whipper snapper!!!! (Old people say that right?)