Fun at the Grocery Store

Went to Krogers today to buy Thanksgiving foodstuff.  Found a box of donuts, 12 powder sugar lumps, for the price of forty-nine cents.  Who could resist?  Having unpacked the bags at home, I opened my donut purchase and took one out to consume.  The treat immediately dehydrated my mouth.  Apparently, when whoever it was made these, they neglected to include any fluids in the batter.   I checked the box and saw that the expiration date was 6:00 o'clock.  The time was 6:05.  Just missed it.  The turkey was also forty-nine cents.  That's per pound.  I examined the turkey and stamped on the packaging was "Best if used before yesterday."

Krogers has a sale on cereal; four boxes for ten dollars and two gallons of milk are thrown in as a bonus.  This is not a bad deal, but the cereal has to be a General Meals product and weigh between 9 and 16 ounces.  I enjoy Cheerios.  I have to remember to save a few of the tiny O's and plant them next spring.  Its always cheaper to grow your own.  Anyways, I took 3 boxes of Cheerios and one box of Trix.  (I know who Trix are for, but I am a kid at heart.)  In the checkout line, when I passed the cereal and milk over the scanner, the price came to nineteen dollars and change.  This was wrong.  I called over the... (checkout girl? checkout woman? female attendant? grocery clerk?)   ... the person who assists shoppers in the self-serve lanes and commenced playing descan/rescan with the cereal.  I would hand her a box.  She would pull the purchase price off my receipt.  I would then rescan the cereal.  We did this for several minutes.  Finally she had all but one box of Cheerios.  She had me scan this single box four times.  And it worked.  The ten dollar total finally appeared and I paid it.  Unfortunately, I only had one box of cereal for my two gallons of milk.  The lady then instructed me to go to the service desk and they would give me the other three boxes.

Don't you just love waiting in lines?  So, now I have to explain to the Service Desk personnel about the cereal.  It was a man this time, and he examined my receipt as if he were Sherlock Holmes.  He stated that I was only charged for four boxes and the price was ten dollars.  "Yes," I agreed, "but I only received one box, my shopping cart is right here, you can count for yourself."  He asked why I would pay for one single box of cereal four times.  I told him that was what the lady said to do.  He gave me a look like I was either a total idiot, or a con man.  What lady? he wanted to know.  So I went through the whole rigamarole about how the price was scanning wrong and how I was instructed to give back boxes and rescan and so on and so forth.  He decided to check out my story and phoned the self serve aisle attendant. Luckily she remembered who I was and concurred that I was owed three additional boxes of cereal.  Service guy tells me go and bring back three boxes of cereal and he will scan them for me.  This I do.  I fetch back two boxes of Cheerios and one box of Trix, and the service guy proceeds to scan them.  He then picks up the Trix and reads the weight.  This is only 9 ounces, he exclaims.  I need the larger size; fourteen ounces.  Whoa!  Mystery solved.  Service guy leaves his post to get the correct size box for me.  When he returns, he hands over three boxes of cereal and my order is finally complete.  

My ten minutes of shopping had turned into two and an half hours.  I don't think I'll be shopping at Krogers anymore.