No Benefit To Using The Card

(My mom and I go to the grocery store together, but purchase things separately. We are both standing in line, while the cashier, a member of management no less, is scanning my groceries, and I am bagging them since there is no one available.)

Cashier: “Okay, your total is $19.22.”

(I’m paying using my EBT card, which I know has $24 and change on it. I swipe the card, enter my pin, and it says authorized, and I go to get my receipt.)

Cashier: “Okay, here you go. Eight cents is your change.”

Me: “Why do I have change? I can’t have change; I paid with my EBT card.”

Cashier: “Oh, I thought you handed me a twenty.” *not that giving me eight cents back if I handed him a twenty for $19.22 made any more sense*

Cashier: *looks at receipt* “I’ll have to re-ring you. I promise it didn’t charge your EBT card.”

(He un-bags all my groceries and proceeds to ring them through again. I go to the EFTPOS machine and swipe my card again, enter the pin, and get a Not Authorized message. The cashier reads the slip that prints out and tells me to swipe again because he had to enter in how much I had on the card. He enters in an amount, I swipe, and he tells me I have a balance of $13 because I didn’t have enough on my card.)

Me: “Then you charged my card previously, because I had almost $25 on my card. You take away the $19 and that leaves the $6.18 you just entered. You just charged my card again.”

Cashier: *loudly* “It didn’t charge you. You just didn’t have enough money on your food stamp card.”

(I again say that I had almost $25 on my card, and he clearly charged it the first time for me to only have $6.18. He finally just hits a button on the keypad and makes the $13 total go away.)

Cashier: “Don’t worry about it; I took care of it this time. Be more careful of your money in the future.”

Me: “Yeah, I’ll be more careful; I’ll never walk through your line again. I’m going to customer service to deal with you ripping me off. Let me have my first receipt back.”

(He grumbles and generally acts like the last thing he wants to do is give me the receipt, but he finally hands me the receipt and as I look at it I see where the first receipt has EBT transfer $19.14 (because there is no tax on SNAP purchases, it was slightly less.) So being annoyed at his attitude, I wave it in his face.)

Me: “If it wasn’t charged, then why does the receipt show it was charged?”

(I gather up my things and start to head to the customer service desk.)

Cashier: *to my mom* “I don’t understand what her f****** problem is. I don’t care what the receipt says; it wasn’t charged the first time. These welfare people are always trying to get something for free.”

Mom: “Maybe if you paid attention to your screen instead of judging people like my daughter for having to use benefits, you wouldn’t have had this issue.”

(For the record I did get the money back, and I had a talk with the store manager and asked him to think about sending the cashier back for retraining.)