I’m in line at a small gas-station shop, with a man in front of me being very argumentative to the cashier (who has a distinct Middle Eastern accent) about cashing in a lotto ticket.

The cashier is waiting for his supervisor while trying to get through the line of people in the meantime. The customer in front of me grows impatient and starts mocking the cashier’s accent, eventually cumulating with him saying:

Customer: “Do you even speak English?”

Suddenly, from behind me in line, I hear:

Other Customer: “He speaks English fine. The problem is he doesn’t speak a**hole.”

I’ve never seen a more challenging figure than the petite, young, blonde woman responsible for that comeback.

The customer in front of me turned bright red and sulked in the corner, but otherwise waited without a peep.

I work in one of several shops in a roughly fifty-mile radius that buys, sells, and trades trading card games — think: Pokemon, YuGiOh, Magic: the Gathering, that kind of stuff, and almost all of it in single cards. We buy collections of cards rather frequently, and it’s not unusual that people will stop by without their cards just to gauge how we work and how things happen.

A guy comes in one evening. He seems nice enough. He tells me he was sent by another store of our acquaintance because they couldn’t afford to buy his collection. This gets flagged in my brain as a jackpot: good cards that we can then sell? Yes, please! 

I give him the email of my manager to schedule an appointment because it’s a very large collection of cards. He’s happy, I’m happy, and I send him on his merry way. 

I’m not there when he returns, but from what I hear from my other coworkers, he comes back with a LOT of boxes, large and small, and a couple of bins. Again, this is not unusual; collections of this size come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve had people come in with plastic bags of rubber-banded cards. You name it, we’ve probably seen it.

My manager tells one of my coworkers to grab a particular box; that’s where the “good” cards are. We know what cards these are, and they’re GOOD.

My coworker grabs said box… and said box is empty. 

Uh-oh. 

Cue the manager and several coworkers frantically going through the entire collection trying to find at least two cards. I’m told this takes upwards of six hours, and I believe it. They go through the collection. They go through it twice, thrice, several more times. The cards are nowhere to be found. 

We contact the guy and tell him the cards are gone.

Guy: *Nicely* “Shoot, I didn’t check the cards after I took them from the other shop. They are there, in the other shop; that’s how they knew it was a massive collection and they couldn’t afford it.”

We contacted the other shop. They didn’t have the cards, either, they claimed. Cue the other store frantically looking. 

Please note: the guy did NOT blame my store in ANY CAPACITY, AT ALL. He didn’t even seem that fazed, to be honest. These were EXTREMELY valuable products, so what was happening here? 

I came in for my shift the other day to get the lowdown on exactly what happened to those cards, and discovered a few things:

• An employee from the other store was let go. We were not told why.
• The other store cut the guy a check for the value of the missing cards.
• A regular at our store told us that the employee who had been let go had worked at that other store for some time…
• …and there were cameras filming what happened.
• There is now a court case.

I don’t know any other details, but it turns out that it wasn’t just those two cards, it was a grand total of forty cards missing. Where those cards went, who could say, but all I know for sure is that our store cut the guy our own check — for the cards he actually gave us. 

The guy was fine, was chill, and went along his merry way… and our store managed to dodge a massive bullet we didn’t even know was there.

The store I work at sells popular trading card games: think Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and the like. The store is set up so there are glass-fronted cases with the more expensive product in them, with the cheaper stuff on the countertops.

In the Pokémon section, there are a couple of boxes on the countertop with cheaper cards in them. Each card is in its own color-coordinated sleeve, and each box clearly indicates prices per colored sleeve. For example, each card in a green sleeve is $1, each card in a purple sleeve is $2, each card in an orange sleeve is $3, etc.

A regular comes in one evening, and we all dislike this kid. Sadly, I pull the short straw as I’m the one manning the front counter, and it’s quiet enough we don’t need too many people up front. I say my hello spiel as the kid comes in, continue what I’m doing, and watch him out of the corner of my eye.

This kid pulls at least fifty sleeves from the Pokémon boxes and lays them all out on the counter. It’s fine; this isn’t the first time this has happened, it’s a slow night, and I don’t need the countertop at this time.

This kid spends a good ten minutes hemming and hawing, pulls out twenty or so of the cards that he wants, and puts the rest back. He lays all his chosen cards out on the counter, one by one.

Kid: “What’s the total for all of these?”

I ring him up, and his total (with tax) is over fifty dollars.

The kid stares at me, slack-jawed and bug-eyed.

Kid: “How could it be this much?! I only pulled, like, twenty cards!”

He pulled twenty cards of various prices, each CLEARLY INDICATED BY THE BOXES THEY ARE IN, and wanted the total to be UNDER $10.

The kid takes the cards back, goes through them again, and removes a single card

Kid: “Okay, how much is my total now?”

The total was now roughly fifty dollars. The kid took the cards back, went through them again, and removed another single card.

This went on for a good fifteen minutes. He finally, FINALLY made his purchase… of three cards.

The worst part is that this happened not once, not twice, but THRICE, the last time with him arguing with me that one of the cards was a dollar because he found it in the dollar box.

The card was in a purple sleeve, making it $2. It was a $2 card. I know it was because I put it there. It may have gotten misplaced, but there is a reason the cards are in color-coordinated sleeves: because of things like this.

This kid clearly does not know how this process works.

Related:
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 44
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 43
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 42
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 41
Here We Pokémon Go Again, Part 40

Customer: “I would like a half-pound of honey ham.”

Me: “Which brand would you like?”

Customer: “Any brand is fine.”

I take out a chub (what we call the meat we cut from) out of the cooler.

Customer: “What brand is that?”

Me: “[Store Brand].”

Customer: “Any brand but that. How about [Different Brand]?”

If that’s the brand you wanted, why not ask for it to begin with?

I was grocery shopping on a busy weekend. I considered myself lucky to find a line with only two customers in it. The person in front was already paying, so they were basically done. The other customer was a lady with a pretty full cart, but I figured the wait wouldn’t be too bad with just one person, compared to the other lines backed down the aisles.

The first customer finished up right as I got in line. I saw the lady was pushing an empty cart in front of her while also pulling the completely loaded grocery cart behind her. There was also a pile of disposable chucks — like the kind you’d see in a hospital or to house train puppies on — sticking out of the cart, and I noticed that all the groceries currently on the conveyor were on top of the same chucks. The cashier greeted the customer, who then pulled what was presumably her own gallon-sized sanitizer from the bottom of the cart and had both the cashier and the bagger sanitize their hands with two massive squirts. She then handed each of them a pair of disposable gloves and would not proceed until they put the gloves on — and then she gave them more sanitizer on top of the gloves!

I then witnessed one of the most insane checkout experiences of my life. I try to have empathy and not to judge the different things people are doing to feel safe, but this was something else.

Everything — not just produce but boxes of cereal, cake mix, peanut butter, etc. — was already in what looked like at least two plastic produce bags. Even though they were already wearing gloves, the customer still did not want the cashier or bagger touching her things directly. She made the bagger hold a plastic bag to pick up her already bagged items, scan them, then pass them off to the bagger.

The bagger, however, couldn’t just hold the bag open to receive the items but had to hold a separate bag to touch the items and then use that bag to put them into double bags. She also interrupted them every few items to make them re-sanitize their hands. The bagger then placed each bag — which had to be about 40% plastic bag and 60% actual grocery content — into the empty cart, now lined with more disposable chucks, where the customer would wipe each bag down with a Clorox wipe.

At one point, the customer shoved what looked to me like twenty or thirty empty produce bags on the conveyor belt and told them to — you guessed it — bag the bags.

I’m pretty sure every single other customer who came into the grocery store at the same time as me had already left by the time this lady was all checked out. I considered moving lanes several times, but human stubbornness being what it is, after fifteen or so minutes I just decided I was in for the long haul, no matter what.

At the end of the transaction, she asked for help to her car. The bagger volunteered to do it, probably figuring it would save someone else getting subjected to this lady. I would’ve thought he had been sanitized enough at this point. Nope. She made him change his gloves and slather the new gloves with more sanitizer on the way out!

When it was finally my turn, I asked the cashier if that customer came through often. He said, “I’ve never had her until now, but yeah, she comes once a week or so. Chewed out my manager last time for suggesting she just get her groceries delivered. Sorry for the wait.”

I tried to give the guy a tip, but he said they weren’t allowed to accept. God bless the essential workers, for real.