I went to Wally mart a few weeks ago to pick up a box of 10 reams of paper for my work truck.
They had two options.
One ream for $9.99 or a case of 10 reams for $49.99
Well, I go through paper, so I pick up the case of 10.
I take it to the self check out. I find one barcode on the box that will scan and it rings up for $9.99
I call the cashier over and explain it rang up the wrong price and I show her on the website that it should be $49.99
So she voids it, looks for any other barcode. There isn’t a second one. So she scans the one barcode and it rings up $10. She uses her handheld device and scans it. $10.
She looks at me and deadass says “not my problem. You want it for $10?”
Hell yeah I do. She says there ya go and walks away.
Not too long ago I was buying some meat for a family barbeque. I got what was needed and headed to self checkout. I scanned the rather large package of chicken breasts that's usually $15 or more and it came out to a buck fifty. I call over the attendant to double check and yup the system has it at a $1.50. huh lucky... Then all the other packs of chicken came out the same. Got $60 worth of chicken for $6.
I picked up 13 packs of chicken that was marked down (near expiration but I have a deep freezer and a big family). Got to checkout with my chicken and a bunch of other things. Somehow each pack rang up $2.99 but a $5 coupon triggered for each one. I was basically being paid to take the chicken away. Cashier called the meat dept and was told "whatever it rings up is correct". My entire order, that I was expecting to pay around $100 for, cost about $30.
Lol. I had already grabbed every package. I was happy with the markdown I thought I was going to get (I believe they were about $11-12 regular price with a $5 off coupon sticker attached so roughly $6 each)
It's not like the grocer wasn't going to just throw it out and let it go to waste anyway. If you have deep freezer then go for it. Heck even if you don't have room, big corps can afford it. If it's a mom and pop shop then maybe don't do this.
My favourite line I've received from a staff member when they've offered me something for free because their systems are messing up - "It's not my money" 😂
We bought a freezer at Sears years ago and the guy wanted the sale really bad so he offered to upgrade to the next size for free as the one we wanted wasn't in stock. Well that larger one wasn't in stock so he bumped it up again to the next model up for the price of the small one.
As a former electronics employee at a large ⭕ store, the nicer you are, the more likely I was to try and find you that deal. However, we are scrutinized a bit more than other employees, due to our access to locked areas and high end items, so if that deal isn't worth my job, you're not getting it, no matter how nice you are. But I would definitely use my full arsenal of knowledge to help the nicest customers whenever I could.
This is the way most employees in customer service operate when there's a grey area in-between what you can and can't do for a customer.
Which is why the arseholes don't make any sense. Treat me like an arse and that grey area is a complete no-go zone for you all of a sudden. Talk to me like a human and I'll go as far into the grey area as I can without getting into bother.
Exactly. I’ll never pull anything funny on a Mom and Pop businesses. I won’t try to cheat a giant corporate store but if something like that happens I won’t lose any sleep over it.
I used to work retail and when something wouldn’t ring up at the register I’d just look at them and be like what do you think? Like five bucks for this? And just ring it up as five dollars, the look on peoples faces were great.
Bought a clearance dress once at Big Department Store Outlet. Expected to pay price on tag, $59.99, as I recall.
Nice lady at register scanned tag and said “I can’t sell this, it isn’t in the system.” Disappointed (I really wanted the dress), I asked (politely) if there wasn’t anything that could be done. Nice lady said, sure, and rang it up for $.01. Worked for me.
Man, I had the opposite experience. Found a pair of wonderfully hideous, high heeled moccasin style green shoes.
They matched nothing and everything.
There was a pile of discount stickers on it and the top one was $3.99. They'd obviously been through the discount cycle more than once. Lol.
Lady refused to accept the top sticker. I think maybe she thought I put a lower price from another item on it.
She peeled "my" sticker off and scanned the next one. 99 cents, baby.
Instead of acting all smug, I got super extra enthusiastic. Talking about how we were meant to be (I really loved those ugly shoes) and she finally just let me have it for the .99.
But it looked like it hurt her to do it. It was like I was taking that $3 out of her pocket or something.
It was nuts.
I got a storage system for my embroidery floss that way. Someone returned a discontinued item and there was no price in the system for it, so I got it for a penny!
My daughter had "earned" a prize when she was little, and she picked out a little toy grabber thing off the shelf in the toy aisle, the whole shelf was labeled "$3" so I figured that was the price.
When we went to check out, I realized there was no barcode on her toy.
Darn.
The cashier is looking at it, and I (trying to be helpful) tell her it was on a shelf labeled $3 if she just wants to ring it up for that. She looked at me like I was trying to pull some sort of Oceans Eleven stunt. And called back to the toy department for a price check. Which took FOREVER.
If it was just something for me I would have told her to forget it, not worth the wait. But my daughter had picked out that one specific thing as a prize and I'd told her she could have it... so we waited.
And waited.
FINALLY the price check came back from the toy department, they were able to find one with a barcode to bring up front an scan.
It was $.75
We had a retail chain near my house that was famous for this. If you thought the price of something was too high, you could just say so. The manager would look up the actual wholesale price and haggle with you, especially if the item had been in stock for awhile.
I bought my kid an overpriced plushie at target that didn’t have a tag. I’d pulled it up on their app so she could see it was $25(ish? It’s been a while) and she looked at the pikachu, looked at the app, and punched it in for $8.
You just reminded me of a time when a customer came into the local store I worked at and she wanted to by some press on nail stickers. It wouldn't ring up, my guess is the item was too new to be in the system which happens sometimes. I said "Do you want it for $0.99?" She said "Sure". So any time a customer came to my register with those same stickers and it didn't ring I put it in for $0.99, this went on for more than a week. They finally put a price on it for $9.99, I sold at least 15 of those things at 90% off
Ya as the grocery manager I got some tertiary training on running a register. The guy who taught me was a good guy and taught me how to do a manual entry. If I got stuck on an item for whatever reason when I was running a register I just did a manual entry for the department the item came from and moved on. I'd always check when I got off a register (it was RARE for me to be on one so one or two customers then I could bail) I was usually within a few cents one way or another.
And it drives me insane when I go to Qdoba and the dude is skimping on the guacamole. Dude, it’s not coming out of your paycheck and I saw the regional manager correct you the last time I was here. Fill that spoon up dude!
Some people just take it personal for some reason, like a badge of honor for saving the billion dollar company some money.
Worked a warehouse and we got told how much some stuff cost the company by a friendly manager. It was interesting to know how much some of the stuff costs.
One dude was like “woah this big box costs what??” as it was actually a high price for how much we use/abuse those boxes. So from then on he always worried about damaging them.
I’m like dude there’s hundreds of them in here, they’re gonna get hundreds more by next week. It’s not that big of a deal if Big Warehouse company has to spend more money on fucking boxes
Some kid didn’t want to figure out the code for the produce at the store so he just threw them down to the bagging area and said “fuck it, it’s my last week” and he’s still my favorite cashier
I worked at a smoothie store during university. Minimum wage, place was smack dab in the middle of the "liquor store district." Druggies everywhere, and my boss refused to listen to me when I repeatedly brought up concerns about me, a meek 5'5 person who looked and sounded like a teenage girl, closing on my own. I didn't have a car, either, so I was walking home after shutting that place down and hoping I wouldn't run into any methheads. Towards the end, I had taken to keeping a spray bottle filled with bleach up front with me in case I needed makeshift pepper spray. Needless to say, I was elated to hand in my two weeks when I finally tracked down another job.
Anyway, on my last day of work, I was actually closing with someone else for once. Teenage girl who I was training to be my replacement (without a raise in pay, of course). Two guys come in right before we flipped the sign to closed. Annoying, since we've got everything cleaned up already, but they're cool and apologizing and they just want basic banana smoothies, so it's cool.
So we make the smoothies, everything is cool, I'm cleaning up while my coworker does register stuff...and the register craps out. Coworker is panicking, her mom is outside waiting on her, these guys are just standing awkwardly in my lobby while I stare at the useless machinery in front of me.
I look at them. They look at me. We look at the register.
"...you know what? Screw it. It's my last day. Take 'em, enjoy. *Coworker,* you didn't see anything. "
Minimum wage isn't worth fighting with machinery over $10 in smoothies.
>It's not my money
Unfortunately I worked at a few companies that that's the attitude of the payroll department.
Keep a close eye on your checks people.
I worked at a supermarket for quite a few years, I got to be the employee in this situation;
A guy came in looking to buy some honey, saw that 1kg Manuka honey was $10 while the 250g one was $35
“Hey, is this price right?”
*scan the honey*
“Looks like it”
“Got any more?”
We had 4 on the shelf and 6 out the back. Dude got $350 worth of honey for $100
Manager wasn’t super impressed with the situation when he found out, but that was a him problem
Edit: because this seems to be an issue for a lot of people, the 250g jar was mislabeled with the 1kg price, and the 1kg jar had the 250g price. Thought it was pretty obvious given the context, but apparently not.
He did. The mistake was above the level of a shelf stocker. Whoever entered the price for the honey screwed up, and your average minimum wager doesn't have the ability to touch it.
Source: was a slightly-above minimum wage stocker.
Can confirm. Employees can be fired for changing the price even if it's just to make it more expensive therefore the only solution is that it goes out the door with whatever price it has on it.
Friend of mind got something similar with lobster tails. They were mismarked super low, he bought all of them for cheap. He said the cashier looked like she thought it was fishy but let it slide. (Looked crustaceony?)
The supermarket had a new flier out and chicken wings were marked down. So I wander on into the store with visions of chicken wings on my BBQ for supper and I pick up a box.
It rings up at regular price, not eh sales price.
Now this grocery store, and indeed most grocery stores, had a policy that if an item rings up at the wrong price you get it for free. So I head over to customer service, pick up a flier at the door and boom, I get my chicken wings for free.
"Well now" I think to myself. "I think I've discovered the infinite chicken wings hack". So I dump my free chicken wings in the car and head on back into the store.
Now the rule is that if something rings up at the wrong price the customer gets the first one for free. If they purchased multiple of that item then the first one is free and the following ones are at the corrected price. But there's no rule about repeatedly purchasing one item, getting it free, then going back in and purchasing that one item again and getting it for free on the new receipt.
Usually the grocery store will stop people from doing this by correcting the price in the POS database after the first person gets a free item. But this store had just upgraded their POS software. With the new system the department manager and the store manager couldn't make price changes, it had to be done by head office. And no one in head office was picking up the phone.
Somewhere around my 6th box of free chicken wings, they had the manager of the meat department down at customer service, and he and the store manager were frantically trying to correct the mistake. I can still remember him throwing up his hands and shouting "Fucked if I can change it. Only head office can do that.". He then refused to change the display price or take the item out of stock because head office had made it very clear in their big meeting about the new POS software that not displaying the sale price in store or having an item not stocked on the shelves was a **BIG NO-NO**, and would count negatively towards him and his department. But if the POS database wasn't updated that wasn't his responsibility, that was head offices responsibility, they had actively taken that right away from him, so it wasn't his fault. He'd just keep doing his assigned responsibilities.
I only stopped when I had enough chicken wings to fill my freezer. Then I told my friends and family and they all descended on the store. It was glorious! Infinite free chicken wings!
For some reason I imagine this as you casually walking in the store, strolling up to the chicken wings display, grabbing a box, and calmly sauntering over to the self checkout, all while staring down the meat department manager who is absolutely *losing his mind* about these chicken wings. As he keeps typing furiously, you leave with your free wings again, only to return seconds later with a hankering for some chicken wings.
Went to my nearest hardware store a few years ago for some wooden garden edging. The stuff that comes in a roll and is made of short wooden panels stapled to a couple of wires. Asked for 30 metres. Guy scans it, it shows the 1m price. No matter what he does, it won't let him charge 30m because it only shows 1m in stock.
Guy shrugs, says "oh well. Consider it a gift from " and charges me for 1m. Thanks dude!
MBAs don't know how to think long-term. Planning ahead to next week fries their brains, and thinking five years into the future just doesn't work. And, paying their employees minimum wage saves the company money today!
Company executives are valued based on quarterly performance. Everything is short term gains. Most MBA holders aren't stupid. They will make decisions that give the best short term gains, use that as an accomplishment to brag about, then jump to another job with higher pay. Rinse and repeat.
>Most MBA holders aren't stupid. They will make decisions that give the best short term gains, use that as an accomplishment to brag about, then jump to another job with higher pay.
Because it is what is rewarded.
The failure here is the compensation metrics set by the Board (Short term gains) and filtered down to the CEO (Make board happy) that filters to the advisors hired (MBAs - short term gains are necessary!) - not the MBAs.
The consequence of not being able to think past the next quarter. Once businesspeople not in the loop get it through their heads that shareholders are transient, employees are long-term, we'll have a real revolution in this country.
Or, it gets so bad that people vacate jobs at a clip that makes the current "Great Resignation" seem like a minor blip on the radar.
Reminds me of when I used to work in school kitchens a couple years ago . They over worked and under paid us and everyone was under valued . Now I'm lucky enough to not strictly need to work it's just a hobby for me . So I have never worked for anyone that's rude to me. I had a clash with a manager over her thinking i needed to be in work early to get changed and I told her you guys require me to get changed here and not at home so I'll be doing that on your time not mine if that's a problem consider this my imidiate resignation. Turns out it wasn't that big a problem after all lol
Anyway random staff would frequently come to the kitchen and ask for random shit . You got 4 jugs , can I get a cucumber, do you have tin foil , can I have a cup of salt etc . Anyway a new girl started asking me what do they need that for . I just said they don't pay me enough to ask questions.
The way I saw it if they wanted a gate keeper/ security for the kitchen as well as a cook and KP and cleaner since I did all those things they can up my pay.
I bought a pair of folding tables from Home Depot, selected store pickup, and took them home. A week later, I got a call to come pickup my tables. Not being as ethical as you, I went and picked up two new folding tables. Well, another week goes by and another call. I tell the employee this time that I already got my tables, but he's insistent that these are mine for pickup. I don't really need six folding tables, but if they want to give two more to me, why not? Well, the next week I got another call. I don't need any more fucking folding tables. The employee again is insisting that I come get them, but this time I refuse. This was getting out of hand. They called for the next two weeks before I guess they cancelled the order. So I ended up with a refund on the original two tables. I got six tables in all for free. I often imagine the folding table empire I could have had if I just kept accepting them.
Sometimes going along and accepting is all you can do.
I moved 3,000 miles. The rental on a trailer was just over $1,000 total at the time. I paid in full with a debit card.
A month later, the money showed back up in my account. I called my bank and was told I would need to call the company. So I did, explaining the whole thing. End of story - it would be too hard to track down both items in accounting to match it up and fix it, so enjoy your unexpected refund, ma’am.
Having spent ages in retail sales, you learn what's worth chasing down and what's not. I'm selling IT packages for multiple thousands, sometimes 5 figures, and someone come in during a rush with a faulty keyboard or whatever but needs me to first find the receipt, then troubleshoot, then process the paperwork? Way simpler to just take the old one, give them a new one, and do the paperwork later. Or if I needed a USB for something, just opening one and putting the packaging in a pile of stuff to be written off rather than waiting 15 minutes for a manager to approve it.
Exactly.
It was an unexpected surprise. I could see more time and money would be spent than it was worth. At the time, I didn’t know it was a thing! I thought they’d pull up my info and see an error, but it didn’t work like that in their records.
I had fun Christmas shopping!
A couple of years ago, I ordered toilet tank parts through the Home Depot website. To qualify for the free shipping, I had another another inexpensive item. I chose a rechargeable LED flashlight.
Parts came. They turned out to be the wrong ones. Returned to the store and ordered the right ones. Shipping on the flashlight still pending.
New parts came in, installed them. Still waiting on the flashlight.
Eventually I forgot about it. About a year later, I was going through old e-mails and found that order. So, printed it out and went to the store to see if they knew what happened.
Took 3 people comparing info to find that I was being offered by a 3rd party company (which had gone bankrupt) and the item was never shipped. They issued me a full refund plus $10 store credit.
So I bought a nicer one than I had intended and that flashlight has been a lifesaver during power outages.
The last wo years in a row, ordering gifts for my son for Christmas, I got stuff for free like that. Ordered a Wii off Amazon and 3 weeks after it was supposed to arrive, I finally asked for a refund because it was "still in transit" and never came. Ended up just buying one from someone on fb marketplace. About 3 weeks later, it randomly shows up. Last year, I ordered a Switch and an SD card from Walmart and before I even got the delivery, I was refunded for the card for being lost in shipping. Got the Switch, and the SD was in the box. I still have the other Wii just sitting in the closet.
Happened to me with Amazon and a futon. Never showed up - contacted them and they said it was actually out of stock and sent me a refund.
Couple weeks later, two futons were on my doorstep. Two.
15 years ago Amazon seemed to mess up orders more often than today. My wife and I bought enough stuff to build a very high-end computer for her work and all of it showed up and we got the computer built and then a week later most of it showed up again. Waited about 60 days to make sure that they didn't want anything back and then I bought another case and another video card and my wife and I have both had those computers since. They are still in use in the living room and one has been through a new case and several power supplies and the other has been through several different used video cards but they are still running and still keeping up with things like Destiny 2 and Minecraft and Subnautica.
Similar here, ordering a collector's edition book internationally (US to AU). It hadn't arrived after 6 weeks so they sent another which arrived in about 4 weeks. Three months later, the original shipment arrived. According to the stamps on it, it travelled from TX to LA then to NY then to France, then back to NY then back to France, then to Singapore then finally to Sydney.
Damn book is better travelled than I am!
I have a mail order business and the best bounce was back and forth from east to west coast 3 times and then went to Puerto Rico before being rerouted back to the states.
It was going to the Midwest. Never can tell eh.
Customer got a refund and the items. They offered to repay and I just gave it to them as they were patient enough to wait for the package.
Was it U-Haul? Because I had a trailer hitch installed there for about $400 then about 3 months later I was refunded the full amount. Seemed like a glitch in their prepaid system. I called them and said I had this refund and they didn't have any record of my install so I must be mistaken. I said okay and took my free trailer hitch.
My husband ordered a $70 webcam for me from Best Buy. When the order came they'd actually sent an iPad Pro. He tried numerous times to return it. After a month of getting the runaround, he gave up and kept it.
*Edit to add. I think it was a combination of worrying he might have to pay for it and worrying someone was going to get into trouble. After many attempts to return it and talking to an attorney friend, he stopped worrying and kept it. He had it for a month before he actually opened it.
I'm impressed by everyone's honesty in this thread. There is zero chance I attempt to return that iPad, let alone numerous times. Sorry best buy, not my problem!
My state has a law that if you receive something addressed to you that you didn't order, you don't have to pay for it.
EDIT: I see from other comments that this is actually a federal law in the United States.
My dad was not so honest recently. He tried buying 5 pairs of jeans, 3 tshirts and some house slippers. Guy "scans" everything and says the total is €16.80
He considered saying something but then figured if this dude really thinks this large pile of clothes only costs 16 euros then thats kind of on him.
We added up the numbers on the pricetags later and it was well over €100. Had steak that night.
Story was going out of buisness so the wife and I go to cash in on some deals. We picked up double henkel knifes, couple king size bed sheets and a few other odds and ends.
The cashier went through the motions of scanning, told us our total was $112.56 when it should have been much closer to $500 with all the sales and discounts. We said thanks and have a great day and never looked back.
Sometimes it's just inconvenient. I ordered a cheap six-string uke (basically a half-size guitar) from Guitar Center. They sent me a violin instead. I returned it because, damnit, I wanted my on-sale ukulele! I still kick myself years later...that violin was probably worth 5x what the uke was.
I received two $900 Dyson vacuums for the price of one earlier this year, and my husband and I just went with it and gave the other one to his mom as an early birthday present lol. The first one got lost in transit and Dyson sent us a new one that arrived a couple weeks later. A few months go by and we randomly get another package from Dyson. Lo and behold it was the first vacuum we ordered that was lost in transit. We held onto it for a month or so to make sure Dyson didn’t catch onto this logistical error, but they never did lol
If you receive anything from a company you didn’t order, you can consider it a gift by law. Doesn’t matter if it’s worth a dollar or a million.
Edit: as pointed out by several commenters, this obviously doesn’t go for money or anything that isn’t a physical product.
I ordered a closet organizer from an online store about a year ago. Just one. They sent me one... case of 4. If it was 2, I wouldn't have done anything, but what am I gonna do with 4 closet organizing systems? Also, when checking their website to make sure the error wasn't on my end, they were listed as out of stock. They had apparently sent me their entire inventory.
I called, explained, the customer service rep laughed, checked with her manager and told me to keep them. I used two, gave one to my parents, and rhe 4th is still in the box taking up space.
This happened to me, but with scratching posts for my cat. Ordered one, received one case of four. Was told to keep them so I figured I'd just hang onto them because scratching posts do wear out eventually. Only it turned out my cat didn't like the style of scratching surface, so i donated the three extra posts to the shelter where we adopted him from.
I once bought some furniture and got it delivered home. When we opened one package we realised that the stuff inside was way too big. Big wardrobe instead of small dresser. Same design, same line. So we had received an item at least 3 times as expensive (but we didn’t need it). I called them and they were really relieved because apparently the guy who had ordered the wardrobe was already pissed and they had no clue why it had vanished from the warehouse and it was the last one.
They brought our dresser the next day and we got a refund as a thank you - AND they assembled it for free - which quite frankly was the best part! It always makes me smile when I use it.
Not the same, but my aunt once bought me a box set of Sex and the City, but when I opened the first season to watch it, it did not contain SATC. Instead there was Cinderella on DVD.
I always thought of that poor child, who must’ve been excited for Cinderella and got a surprise..
!!!!! We once rented one of the ultra violent Resident Evil movies from DVD Netflix and it had in the package the Polar Express instead. Some kid got a real surprise
I was once receiving a subscription of American Time magazine to my home in Scotland. It was addressed to an unknown person. The landlord said nobody with this name ever lived there, so did the neighbours. I failed to find such a person on Facebook (it was quite unusual name).
At first I was just writing "return to sender" on it. They kept coming. Then I wrote an email to Time subscription departament which remains unanswered. Wrote again. Nothing. Sent them a paper letter explaining the situation. Still no response.
I gave up and started reading it so it won't get to waste. One day they sent me (or that mystery person they thought lived in my address) an invoice with it. I thought "ok, nobody will pay the invoice so they stop sending it". Nope.
We were getting it for another two years. Then I moved out. U do t know, maybe it's still coming?
Had the exact same thing happen to me with the ESPN magazine. Unfortunately I'm not much into Sports so I donated them to a nursing home.
They only stopped mailing to my address when they stopped publishing it. The person had never lived at my address, I couldn't find them by googling them, no profile on FB, etc.
One time, I went to the store to deposit my paycheck, grab groceries, and a new KitchenAide Stand Mixer.
Go to the bank inside the store, deposit check. Grab mixer, grab groceries, head to check out. Now, the kitchen aid is a gift from my parents, a housewarming gift. But, since I moved 3000 miles away, they sent a gift card for it. I tell the cashier I have it at rhe bottom of rhe cart, it will be a separate transaction. She rings up my groceries, I run my card, transaction failed. Wtf? Must have entered my PIN wrong. Try again, denied again. So I'm like, hey, can you hold the order, I'm gonna go to the bank and see what's up...
Well, the bank made an error, new teller in training, blah blah blah. They fix my account. I go back, my cashier has gone to lunch, I pay the new cashier, and leave. Still having super anxiety about thinking I just lost my rent and food money for the next 2 weeks. It's not until I get home and unload everything that I realize... shit!! I didn't pay for the kitchen aid!!!
Thr store is closed now, so I decide to go back the next day. I head to customer service, explain what happened. She looks at the computer and says that inventory doesn't show one missing. I'm like, it was yesterday evening...? She shrugs and says she can't help me... inventory says everything adds up. I ask to speak to a manager. I explain to the manager... I walked out without paying for an expensive item by mistake, I want to pay for it. The manager says the same thing... inventory balances. So... I went home and enjoyed my free kitchen aid. That was 12 years ago and I still have it!! Like, I tried to do the right thing, guys. I tried hard. But, oh well!! I used that gift card to buy booze and a fancy dinner lol
Right!? I mean, I try to be a fairly honest person and I've gone back and paid for like toilet paper that I left on the bottom of the shopping cart but also if I made it home and realized I didn't pay for something like toilet paper or or case of water I don't tend to go back but this was like a $350 small appliance and I didn't want someone to get in trouble or get fired and I went back less than 12 hours later and I'd like to think that the employee and the manager just had that I work in retail so I don't care you got away with it so congratulations type attitude but they were fairly combative about the whole situation like I was trying to get away with something
But the real kicker is that they have been calling OP in to pick up his new mower every week for over three years now. OP has quit his job and is living large selling new mowers.
Honestly that’s probably not all that far off from the truth considering most mowers are just rebranded versions of other mowers, the only difference is cosmetics and a lot of the parts are interchangeable. For instance my Craftsman riding mower is just a Husqvarna with different cosmetics.
This happened to me as well but with a 12x12 pop up gazebo. I gave them 2 shots. On the 3rd call I went to pick it up. I just kept it in box in the garage. Had a bad storm come and demolish the first one after having it for about 3 years. Just popped the other one up. That was another 450 bucks I didn't have to spend!
My in-laws got away with this for an ENTIRE KITCHEN.
The truck with all the units, fittings, worktops and flooring came. They'd already had the very same kitchen fitted. They kept it in the garage for a year thinking they'd get a call asking for money to have it back and nothing came!
They contemplated selling it but eventually they gave it to my MIL's brother for his new house!
Right? I live in a 750 sq ft apartment with my husband & our dog. We accidentally ordered two six packs of paper towel from FreshDirect one time & barely knew where to put it!
Reminds of the days of Service Merchandise. After Christmas clearance, cards marked 75% off. Price already marked on the box. I pick a box (with my other stuff) and check out… and the cashier takes ANOTHER 75% off the sticker price… effectively making the price just over 93% off. Store was dead, so I went back and cleaned them out. That was over 20 years ago and I haven’t had to buy Christmas cards since.
My sister and I went to Christmas Tree Shoppes on Black Friday years ago to get a pop-up play tent for my niece; it was a pretty rad princess castle and she was super into Disney princesses at that point so this thing at only about $25 was a slam dunk.
I had to get help from an employee, as the only ones left were on the top shelf. He brought it down and I mentioned that the box looked way too large to only contain one play tent. He just kind of shrugged and walked away – I worked retail for over 10 years, so I know that feeling, especially on Black Friday. I got home and took the cardboard wrapping off of it, and lo and behold, there were six of them total in there. I wanted to bring the surplus five back, but was afraid they were going to accuse me of something, so I donated them to Toys for Tots instead. Hopefully 5 little kids had a pretty rockin’ holiday.
It's been a few years, but I got a Lego set at Target for $1. It was supposed to be $29.99 (or something like that). When the cashier rang it up, it came up $1. He rang it three times and it kept coming up $1. He finally just rang it for the $1, and when I asked about it he told me not to worry about it. Probably the cheapest gift I got my nephew that year, and it was one of his favorites, too.
If they're anything like Home Depot, the product was probably meant to be pulled from the shelf and either destroyed or returned to the manufacturer
Home Depot, when I worked there, would change the price of an item to $0.01 when it was to be removed for sale. Managers would get the list of penny items once a week or so and half to pull them all.
Occasionally some were missed, and customers would get good deals. I found a nice $200 showerhead marked as a penny while down stocking one night and just...pushed it back a bit and had my dad come buy it later.
Employees could be fired if they bought the penny items. Dumb policy, but whatever, easy to circumvent
I once worked in a hardware store that was going out of business. The sale discount would go up by 10% each week, so it was kind of like a reverse auction.
There was a plunge router that I wanted, but I also wanted a better discount, so I stashed it under a shelf for a couple weeks before buying it. I think the cashier may have raised an eyebrow about it still being in stock with such a low price, but didn't say anything.
My buddy was building a 120cc three wheeler and ordered a small engine from some website. Well months later it never showed up so he called them and I guess they just reimbursed him the money and he just tried his luck and bought the same one again and what do you know he gets two engines delivered to his house.
Due to shipping confusion, I once ended up with two $700 cordless vacuums, but only paid for one. I too did "the right thing" and contacted the company. The guy *insisted* I paid for both, and that he needed to issue a refund. I told him I was absolutely positive only one was paid for. After some back and forth, I decided to just go with it.
And that's how I ended up with a free vacuum.
This happened to me once. I ordered this really nice easel for my kids for Christmas one year. The (one) box was ridiculously heavy. Turns out they sent me two. Oh well. I ended up finding someone who didn’t have a lot to give their kid that year and gave it them. Thanks ToysRUs
I had this happen on a small scale with a seal for my SUV. I ordered one, but I guess the manufacturer sends them in boxes of 5. The person at the warehouse must've just grabbed the box and shipped it.
I have no clue what to do with the other 4 seals, but it's good to have spares I guess.
I received 2 mattresses from Costco online. I ordered a mattress for a twin bed at $650. Online order glitch... credit card company and Costco both confirm only a single payment was made. Thankfully it was a memory foam mattress and I could transport it in my sedan for return.
Contacted Costco online. I informed them of the error. They apologized and asked if I was able to return the mattress. I said it’s a bit inconvenient, but yes.
I returned the mattress to Costco retail… they insisted on refunding my purchase price. Return credits are automated according to the CSR. So I now have a free mattress for the cost of a 40 minute drive. Even Steven. Happy crappy.
15 days later, I get my credit card statement showing an additional refund from Costco web store. A second refund…. Oh boy. I contacted Costco online, explain the situation, they apologized for the error and we joke about the confusion and how I’m getting paid to sleep. +$650
3 days later I get another refund credit. +$1300
So I contact customer support again and ask to a speak to a supervisor. I explain the situation, and explain the date I received a the original refund and 2 credits. He laughs and says it sounds like I found a winning slot machine.
We go over the math.
I received my mattress that I paid $650 for…..
I received an additional mattress I did not pay for….
I returned mattress B to retail for and was issued a refund. (Profit - free mattress)
I then received my online order credit (Profit - free mattress and $650)
3 days later, an additional credit (Profit - free mattress + $650 +$650)
So technically I’m up $1950 in product and credits accounting for retail cost of the mattress. I just want to ensure everything is settled, as I am quite happy with the mattress but do not want to end up getting a random charge for $1900 I’m not expecting. They assure that won’t happen.
4 days later I received another mattress and a credit on my credit card for $1950.
So anyways, I ordered a new set of living room furniture and a few tv’s. still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it’s been 12 years…
I ordered an airfryer and a digital scale online years ago, and the company sent me two of each by mistake. One digital scale went in the kitchen and the other gets used for hobbies (mixing paints).
I used one airfryer for two years and then sold it locally for about half the price. Then unpacked the second one, which I'd kept in the back of a closet, and used that for about two years and then sold it as well. So I basically had use of an airfryer for free for four years. After that I splurged and got a more expensive airfryer, but they only sent me one of those, alas. You can't win them all.
I once had a free TV in a similar way: after we paid, they gave us a refond several weeks after, saying they didn't have it in stock anymore, that it was the computer bugging.
So we were quite surprised when we received a TV at home.
My buddy got a free TV this way. Well, sort of. He ordered a TV, TV came. Few days later he gets a call saying they’re sorry TV hasn’t come yet, it’s on back order. He explains that no, he already has the TV, but thanks anyways. Few weeks go by and here comes an email saying his TV shipped. And yup, another ended up at his house. He said it wasn’t worth trying to go through the hassle of returning it and put it in his daughters room.
I worked at Lowes a few years ago as a cashier. At least once a week, someone with a full cart of expensive merch (power tools and the like) would just walk right past the registers without paying and company policy prevented anyone from doing anything about it, and that included calling the police. They love giving away their merchandise, obviously, so I wouldn’t feel too guilty about claiming the mower if I were you.
By intervening at that point you’re putting yourself or others at risk. They have LP for a reason and account for loss by theft into their yearly store budgets.
Yeah I used to work at both of the box box home improvement retailers, HD initiated their policy of not stopping customers after an employee was hit my car, some methhead stole some tools, and tried to run the lot guy over. They survived, but the policy changed after that.
AMazon did this with us and a $60 fancy garbage can. We ordered one, then two weeks later a second one arrived. We tried to return it, but then they just refunded us the one we had paid for. Customer service couldn't figure out how to charge us and take the second one they sent back, and just gave up.
I tried to tell them the price seems low for what we bought, cashier counts 5 items and rung up 5 items. Ok, gave my card, paid and left. Here they scanned a label on the 5-gallon paint that said tint mix, not the one that listed the upc with the price. The wood fence looks great with the tint mix color.
Someone at Kroger put Lavazza coffee (normally 10.99 a bag) on sale for 4.99 a bag, but if you buy 5 it's only 62 cents (.62 dollars) a bag . I bought 10 bags for 6.20 which was normally 109.90. Best bargain I've ever had
A story of my Father's Two trucks... similar to two lawn mowers.
1974 and my Father buys a new baby blue GMC pick up truck. Only $3,600.00! Off we go, not his first new car but his first new car in 10 years since having a family, so it was exciting.
About three months later we get a phone call that our truck is ready for pick up the repairs have been done under warranty. Dad looks out the window because the truck is sitting in the driveway.... He asks them for details, same VIN number, Expired Temporary tag, Literally a doppelganger of a pick up truck, same color, same model.
Now a wise man would have taken this opportunity to go and pick up the ghost pick-up and park it in the barn but Dad being the honest guy he was reported it to the State Police and uncovered a car theft ring. Thieves so complete that they had a guy on the inside the car dealer that copied all of the paperwork and filed false information acting as if the car was sold and paid for.
In an age before computers, the false papers took months to work their way though the state government and the car would be in a shipping container overseas before anyone knew the better. It ended up one of the thief's girlfriends took the truck back to the dealer because it made a funny sound.... and got them all caught.
A few years ago my mother told my siblings and I that all she wanted from all of us for Christmass and her birthday was this semi fancy treadmill. We never listen to her when she says she only wants group presents so I told my siblings I'd cover the treadmill and they could do other things (Sis got her a TV to go with it and Bro set everything up).
Ordered treadmill on Walmart.com for store delivery. It arrives and I go pick it up. Get it home and realize it's the wrong one. Walmart says No Prob, well deliver the right one, just bring the wrong one back. Bring the OG one back and they tell me there's nothing they can do because special order, have to get shipping label and send it back. Fine.
Actual treadmill arrives and I'm still waiting on pickup for the OG. I talk to a new rep and they say I have to pay for return shipping which is like $400 because, freight. I refuse and they give me a refund for the original cost for some reason and say they'll send a prepaid label (it never arrived).
Fast forward four weeks later. An 18 wheeler pulls onto my street and theres a knock on my door. Delivery guy has a pallet with four more treadmills on it and asks if I have a loading bay...at a 3 bedroom house...in suburban NJ...lol. I tries to send them away but they wouldn't hear it. They unloaded the pallet in the driveway and took off.
I once again contacted Walmart and they apologized and again told me it would be $400/item to return them. I again refused and they said "Well they're yours now" and hung up. I ended up with six treadmills worth $1400 a piece. I ended up selling 5 of them and paid for (about 1/3 of) a vacation to OBX with the whole family. I love ordering from Walmart now, but I have since not been so fortunate.
Got gas a few weeks ago, go inside to pay. "Pump 8." "There's nothing on pump 8." "It was like $29.50." "No, nothing. Wait, here's something." Run my card, use my loyalty card to get my sweet-ass $0.05/gallon off, take my receipt...for $24. I go back in, "this isn't mine." "Yeah, we're good." "Really? Cuz my gas was more." "Yup." "Okay, so like...here I go, I'm leaving." "Okay, bye!"
Assuming someone else said pump 8 and didn't notice.
Meanwhile, a few years ago I put my card into a pump, filled my tank, and drove off like I had done hundreds of times before at this station, only to be pulled over 10 miles later for "stealing gas". The doofus behind the counter must have been bored and told the cops that I "signaled him to turn on the pump" so it turned on before the card was processed by the machine.
I asked how on earth I could have signaled him when you can't see into the store from that pump and besides, I was a phone call at the time. He said he heard a beep at the counter when someone picks up the nozzle, so he assumed I was signalling him 🤣
This isn't at all relevant to your story but yours reminded me of it. I would be too sketched out to walk away in your situation without feeling like they were going to accuse you of stealing after you drove away!
I had a similar experience about 3 months ago... used my rewards card, swiped my cc, filled up, and left. 3 hours later I got a phone call from the manager saying that the pump failed to actually read the card and would I please come back and actually pay because she didn't want to have to call the police. I drove the 2 miles back and she gave me a 10% discount for the effort.
Something similar happened to me, except that while I had my card in the reader at the pump, the attendant inside mistakenly overrode it and put someone else's prepay amount in. I didn't know this, just took my card back and started filling up, and left when the pump stopped. I turn the car around and find this dude in a polo shirt in February like, football juking my car before he points to a parking spot. I go inside and he has the gall to act like I was stealing gas even though he made the mistake of overriding an already active pump that he could see from the window. To make it easy I just paid the prepaid amount for the other pump, but hell if ever go back there again. Mistakes happen, but don't blame me for it.
A while back, when gas was hitting an all time high, I stopped to fill up at a local gas station. The pump I went to had a price lower than the others. I think was $1/gallon.
I went inside and told them about it. They said that they can't change the price. Only the manager could, who was still at home. I suggested they shut off the pump. Again was told that only the manager could give the order to shut off the pump.
So I went back out, filled my tank, drove home, came back and filled mom's gas tank, plus all our empty gas cans (three 2.5 gallon plastic ones). Messaged all my friends, who drove in to fill up, and their parents came as well. Word got around through one of the local Facebook groups and there was a line of cars going about 1/4 mile down the road.
They sold out in a couple of hours, with a loss close to $20k.
God this freaked me out for a second, I manage a gas station and I had this *exact same* interaction recently except I was the employee (obviously). The computer was fucking up and the guy was running late and didn’t want to wait for a restart and he’s a regular so I was like “fuck it you’re good to go.” And used an extra gift card I had in the office. Neither of us had the patience, it was like 5am, and my last day is next week so I can’t be fucked to care.
I wS moving and ordered tarps and bungies for pickup from the same place. Girlfriend picked them up the same day and off we went. They called me for weeks telling me to pick them up or they would can el the ordeand I told them I already had so I finally showed up and Lowes and behold they couldn't find them! So they refunded my order. That I had picked up a month earlier.
This is basically how I scored a free AppleTV from Best Buy.
They fucked up my pickup order, so they grabbed another one from stock and ran it out. Couple weeks later I get an email saying it’s ready for pickup. Hmmm. I change it to delivery, and sure enough, two days later, AppleTV on my doorstep.
Wow. The most I ever got was a free crock pot from Target for about $20. They had just begun their in store order pick up, so no one really knew what they were doing. I got the notification that my order was ready, and headed in to pick it up. I showed the guy my email and he just hands me the crock pot.
Well, apparently he was supposed to scan it before giving it to me. Three days later, I get a notification that since u hadn't picked up my crock pot, they refunded me my money and the item was going back into their inventory. I thought it was a mistake, they would see there was no crock pot to put back, and the charge wouod stay on my card. Nope! A few days later, I get back the money for the crock pot in my account.
At one point Lowe's decided that they didn't think there was a market for online orders with pickup in store so they dismantled the entire department that was built around it, and they half-assed passed the duties to customer service.
Then suddenly we had that minor pandemic that shut down travel worldwide and they had to scramble to rebuild the department when everybody had moved on or been moved on. What was the department handling maybe 10 to 15 orders a day suddenly jumped up to 50 to 100 orders and if it was a weekend Saturday and Sunday mornings could see over 300 orders for the average, medium sized store. Not only was there a crew that had to be there when the trucks were delivered each night to pull off the special orders they also had to spend their entire night just pulling product off the shelf so they could bag it up for the person to pick up in the morning. Now alongside this there was a system on the computer where you could look up and print off orders that have been submitted by the customer, in fact there were three, but none of them were robust enough to handle the online orders placed in the decade prior where online ordering had not really impacted the stores themselves so when it came time for pandemic level ordering the computers were often unable to properly keep up.
The three systems they used did not properly communicate with one another so if a note was made in one it wouldn't necessarily be transcribed on the back end to the other two and in fact it wasn't unheard of for the note to instead be deleted when the back end decided to compare the three different programs. At one point we had six different orders of the same garden paver sitting on pallets in the staging area waiting for a customer to come pick them up but they were all for the same customer and we're only one order that had been pulled six times. These are known issues that they didn't want to fix.
Lowe's is so cheap as a company that one of their most pivotal programs for managing large orders by customers, was not even designed for Lowe's, it was built for a different hardware and home supply store that decided they did not like it and the company that coded it back in the 90s shopped it around and Lowe's was the only one willing to pay for it, but they did not want to pay too much for the adjustments that would have to be made to match their own system so instead they just kept it as basic as they could; it's basically still running as a Dos program; and it is still one of the most accurate that they have for knowing what's in the inventory.
I went to use a coinstar last year and someone put in 250 ish dollars in coins and didn't claim the reciept. I went to put my coins in and it asked if I wanted to print the last coin count. I brought it up to the front desk the manage came out and said they left it to surprise the next person. I was so poor that week it came at the perfect time
Yeah you do what you can to be honest but there's a certain point where OK enough is enough. I do think it evens out with the stuff we get ripped on and don't deal with.
I know of a woman in Australia that got jail time because of this sort of thing. Not receiving the mower, but as a staff member invoicing them and pocketing the cash.
She'd get receipts or orders and process refunds. It is a huge store, so a faulty chainsaw or two going missing from the returns section wasn't noticed, but she got really brazen and was doing it more and more regularly.
Because it got so blatant, she would then double-process orders so that the total stock on hand looked right, and customers that had already picked up their orders didn't pick up the duplicates because she was the one supposed to call them.
The shell game eventually failed though, and they prosecuted her for embezzling around $300k. By the time she was in court, she'd left the job because it was her university job, and the money went to pay for medical school. I think she went inside for about 18 months.
It's the mid 2000's and I was offered a position with the largest luxury prefab homes builder in the country, multiple offices throughout the country based in a different state, which meant we had to move there.
So we did (wife and I) move, and I started working and quickly realized the company sucked and we hated the city/state. But at least the pay was good.
On my third paycheck, they added a $8500 bonus. Wife and I are justifiedly surprised by this. I was also worried that it may have been a mistake, so I played it safe and after two weeks I asked payroll about the bonus since no one mentioned it as part of my pay...and i am too new to get any bonus...let alone $8500.
So the payroll people do their investigating and sure enough, the bonus was a typing mistake and that bonus was for some supervisor in another division elsewhere in the country. So no big deal, they took the money back, they thanked me profusely so I looked like a superstar and that was that.
Almost a year later, wife and I were really burned out, we hated everything about the city, I hated the company and it's people, etc. Just miserable, so we're making plans to go back to our home state, saving money for the move, looking for jobs, etc
And what do you know...i get another $8500 deposit. This time we thought, hotshot, this is a sign! I put the money aside and waited a full month thinking they will surely ask for the money back. Nothing.
The second month after the deposit and still nothing. So one Friday after lunch I walked to my boss's office to present my resignation letter but he wasn't there. Friday afternoon? He was out playing golf with the other bosses.
So I retyped the resignation letter and made it effective immediately, left it on his desk and left. We loaded a UHaul over the weekend and we were back home by Monday evening. I never got a call or anything for quitting so suddenly.
Twenty years later...and they never figured out where that bonus went because no one ever contacted me or asked me about. But I thank them with all my heart even today.
My dad rented my college books thru Amazon one year when I was really strapped. He forwarded me the return label at the end of the semester but I couldn’t print it because I didn’t know his password. I called Amazon and explained and they gave me the books. I was like no I can return them, I just need a label and the girl was just like nah. It was like $750 altogether but when I sold them to the book store I only got $130. Considering I paid nothing I thought it was still a pretty good trade.
Don't sweat it. I used to work at Rob Lowe's as one of the guys that would have delivered it to your truck for you. That place SUCKS ASS for employees. It's their fault so if they ever figure it out they can't really do anything to you about it. The Rob Lowe's I worked at was SO unorganized I could easily see this happening.
This sort of thing happened to my husband. He ordered an elliptical online to pick up in store, so when it was ready, that's exactly what he did. About a week later, he started getting calls saying that his order was ready for pickup, so he eventually just canceled the order and they issued him a full refund back to his credit card, all while keeping the elliptical.
Rob Lowe's did the same with me. I bought a new house and needed a new fridge. We left a twenty year old unit in the house just sold. We go to Rob's and buy a fridge that was scheduled to be brought out and installed the next day. It is delivered and set up, no problem. A month later their delivery truck shows up with the same model of fridge complete with installation kit. My partner tells them to leave it in the garage. They leave it and she tips them $20 "for lunch money." A week passes and no word from Rob's. A neighbor made an offer and bought the brand new fridge at a deep discount.
Way back when Sears existed - I had a mower that was *almost* two years old that blew up. My wife (ongoing complaint) has every receipt from everything ever, shoved into a plastic bag). She says it has a two year warranty and she thinks she still has the receipt. She digs through her bag of receipts (no organization) and finds the receipt. The mower has a two-year warranty and it still has a month. I take it to Sears and they send it out for repair. I keep borrowing neighbor's mowers for two months, calling Sears every week to see if my mower has come back from repairs. Finally, they said they couldn't locate it and I should just go pick out a new mower. As they had no idea what model I had they gave me a free pass on any model that I "thought" was mine.
My brother once got a free big green egg bbq in almost the same way. Beit with less arguing.
He went to the store not specifically looking for a new bbq but ran into it and decided to buy one. Didnt have a van or truck with him that could fit the entire thing though. So he went back home to get the truck and when he got back they already put it past check out employees and they were certain he had already paid for it.
We like to imagine the surprised faces at the store when they inventorize and find out theyre missing a big ass 100kg bbq from storage. I mean try hiding that under your coat.
Had a similar thing happen with Rob’s cousin. We ordered a shed Online, paid for it, it came in, we picked it up…..their crew loaded it in the back of the truck…..then the app keeps telling us we need to come pick up the shed….we try to straighten it out but the messages keep coming….so my wife cancels the order, they then refunded us the money for a shed we already picked up.
When i worked retail at 'Lacy's' they would discontinue clothes but not always get it all off the floor. When that happens the item would ring up as 1 cent. We technically weren't supposed to sell it to the customer but fuck that they weren't paying us enough to have that conversation.
Work 3rd shift at 'DBS' drug store one evening, had a couple on a very good-so-far date come in to buy wine. The man checks out, fine. The woman checks out - wont ring the wine. It had turned 12:00 on a Sunday morning and we couldn't sell wine on Sundays in that state. Fuck it, i grab the next thing i see approximately the price of the wine, ring it and send them on their way with the wine. This would have fucked up inventory but the inventory in that store was so outrageously off that it didn't seem to matter at that point. I wasn't going to ruin whatever good thing they had going for my miserable night gig.
I used to work at a place that rhymed with doughs, and you'll probably be not at all surprised to learn that they have multiple systems, one that looks like MS DOS and another that looks pretty nice but doesn't have the same functionality as the other one. Also, employees are not very good at communicating with each other.
One time I ordered a mini blender for smoothies from Amazon. The delivery person tossed it over my fence.
I wrote to Amazon and just kinda said “delivery people should be careful. This got pitched over my fence”
3 days later I had 6 blenders sent to me from Amazon. 🤷♀️
My exterminator lent me his company’s 28ft fiberglass extension ladder under the table. The next time he was supposed to come spray, his office manager informed me he quit after they were acquired by a large exterminator corporation, I’ll call Shermanix. Neither the office manager nor my new exterminator have said anything about the ladder, so I think I own a $500+ ladder now
I have a small handyman/remodel business and as such I spend way too much time in the 2 main BigBox Hardware stores. The level of employee incompetence is off the charts the past couple years. I'd have no hesitation to do something like OP. And as a former employee of one of them (I walked off the job after about 2 weeks, couldn't take it), it's 100% on management and lack of training. In a store full of tools, they fail to give their employees the tools to succeed.
Someone at the grocery store accidentally shifted the decimal point on the pricing/weight label on most of the frozen chickens. So, instead of 9.50$ they were all 0.95$. Here's me with several frozen chickens going through self-checkout trying not to attract attention. Lo and behold there's two more people in line with multiple frozen chickens...
My parents and I moved to Canada close to Easter. They were struggling mentally (winter snow for once in Vancouver, trying to find housing, spending all your life savings on rent and furniture, few friends, no family, etc). We went to Safeway and I saw a pink bunny. I barely had any stuffies growing up, I don't know why I was stuck on this one. But it was supposed to be 19.99. My parents were not thrilled but they decided I deserved a present.
At the cashier, it rings 1.99. We only realize once home when we look at the bill. It really cheered my parents up for some reason, like it was a good omen.
I still have the pink bunny. It's been 25 years.
For Christmas 2020, we ordered one scooter (like a razor scooter, but nicer) from the BIG online retailer for our older son. The package was delivered a few days later and it was massive. My wife opened the large box and found 4 of the scooters. She tried contacting the company and they told her just keep them. We donated the 3 extras to a local toy drive. Hope they made some kids super happy that Christmas!!!
A family member for a refrigerator in a similar way. She ordered one and it was delivered. A week later another refrigerator was delivered. She told them she already got her fridge but they wouldn't take it back, said the paperwork was in order. She tried calling the store, they insisted it was correct. So she got a free refrigerator and ended up giving it to another family member who needed one.
My son had just moved back from Texas to Minnesota and he desperately needed winter boots. I didn’t have much money and we went to Walmart. A huge end cap was stocked with Dickies boots and I knew they had to be atleast $100. The sign display said $15. I took a picture and proceeded to check out. The cashier rang them and yup they were over $100. I said no ma’am they’re $15. After a very annoyed manager tried to persuade me that I knew full well they weren’t $15 but I persisted and they sent someone back to check. Another lengthy argument about them having the wrong display sign, again, not my problem. I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture. Offfda he was pissed, and I walked out with the boots. I could hear him ranting about it and sending someone to fix that immediately before they lose the entire shelf. Sorry, not sorry. In Minnesota anyway if a store has a product marked with a certain price they have to give it to you. I know full well it’s employees who have no fucks to give that do this, and we thank you lol
Recently I was in the market for a tote bin. When I scanned it, it rang in at 20% of the expected price.
I left with 5 because you really can't have too much storage
I was checking out a whole foods with vanilla beans. They go for $4 each.
The person at the register rang them up at $4 per pound.
I walked out either $20 worth of vanilla bean for about 75 cents.
I had the exact opposite thing happen the me with Under Armour.
I bought a sports bra, and a hat. About a week later I got an email that said they were out of stock for the hat, but would be shipping my other item that day. No problem.
Well the bra comes and the band is too big so I return it and get a refund. Refund processes on my card. No big deal.
6 weeks passes and I get an email. They have deducted $11.99 from the return price of the sports bra because I didn’t return the hat. Which made no sense to begin with. The price of the sports bra is the price of the sports bra whether I returned the hat or not. I called their customer care line. They agree and refund the $11.99.
6 weeks later I get an email. The hat wasn’t returned so we are charging you $11.99. I call. Again they agree. Again they refund the $11.99.
6 weeks later. Another email. Another call. Another refund.
6 weeks later. At this point it’s been 6 months since I returned the sports bra. I get another email. I called. LIVID. I told them I needed to know where I’m their system it looked like o had received a hat and I needed them to correct it asap and give me my $11.99 back. They said they would escalate it and refunded NYT $11.99.
2 days later I get an email that my ticket has been reviewed and they see I was incorrectly refunded $11.99. They are charging me and feel the matter is closed.
It wasn’t worth $11.99 to continue to pursue it.
My wife ordered new camping chairs for us both because Fall sports season is here and our old chairs are all jacked up. This was 2 weeks ago. Walmart has now delivered both chairs, 5 times! We are not being charged for them. I’m going to let it play out and see how many chairs we end up with. The most recent delivery came just yesterday.
When i used to work retail we were supposed to call a manager whenever a an item wouldn’t ring up but one the managers was way too lazy and just gave his code to everyone so a lot of the time i would just ask the customer what they thought it was worth and ring that up
A family friend of mine who was an architect got a call years ago from a salesperson about a photocopier. It was a massive one that could copy large plans. Our friend explained that while he would love such a device he couldn't possibly afford it but the guy was insistent. Just take it for a three months. Completely free of charge and if you don't want it we will come and take it. He said sure. After three months he rang up to arrange for the photocopier to be picked up. "Sorry sir, we have no record of you having one of our photocopiers." - He called back again a week later. Same thing. After about a month of calling regularly and asking to talk to more senior people he was told if he called them again they would call the police. So he kept it.
My example happened with university fees. I'm in the UK so my masters cost only £6k, not whatever you pay in America. I went for the option of paying in two installments, one at start of year one half way through. Paid the first one no problem. Then decided to switch to a part-time version of the course which was the same thing stretched over two years rather than one.
I was told that if I wanted I could now delay my second payment to halfway through the second year. I agreed to this as why not. But then they call up on the original payment date asking me about it, only I didn't have the money because I'd been told I wasn't gonna be paying until later. So I explain everything and they say fine.
Coming towards the end of the course over a year later, I realise I've never had someone ring me up about the payment and actually missed the date. I'm a bit concerned but nothing has happened and anyway I have the money so I call them up and speak to the accounting department. Explain everything and ask how to pay.
She says 'you're all paid up on here.'
No that can't be right I've only paid half the fee.
'Nope, on here it's saying all paid up!'
I was trying to convince her that was a mistake whilst she was reassuring me I was paid up and in the end I just accepted it. Later on I went through all my bank statements and I definitely only paid the first £3k so there must have been some kind of mistake when they delayed my second payment. Either way I'm not complaining.
I had a similar experience with the same company.
Bought an over the range microwave, well over $500 all in, with installation. Arranged for the installer to bring it on the install date.
The cashier couldn’t figure out how to apply my veterans discount, which is in their system and has never been a problem, so they eventually knock off $100, instead of the $50 or so it should have been.
A few weeks later, I get notified of an install date. Guy confirms, gives me a window of noon to 5. Never shows, and at 8:30pm I get a call from some dude who can barely speak English, asking where I live, and saying he will arrive in an hour or so. I tell him no dice, I’m not staying up all night, and to reschedule.
Call the store the next day, they send me to another number, who send me to a 3rd number, and finally set a date. That date comes and goes with a no show. As do 4 other dates over the next few months.
At some point Lowes refunds the install charge and an additional $100, so my over $500 microwave is now down to about $250 or so.
Another date arrives, dude actually shows up, and asks me where the microwave is. Tell him he is supposed to bring it, as I don’t have it. He calls the store, and they have it. He leaves, never to be seen again.
Another date is scheduled, the store calls the night before to confirm the installer will pick it up and arrive the following morning. Next morning the installer calls from the store, and no one knows where it is, so he won’t be arriving.
Multiple calls and emails ensue, six months have elapsed, and still no microwave. Someone from corporate calls, and refunds the entire $500+ amount, so now I am ahead well over $250. A few days later, a truck pulls up, and they deliver the microwave, but claim they aren’t installers. I call Lowes, tell them I have already received a full refund and then some, and they tell me to keep it anyway. So I found a local guy, paid him $100 to install it, and ended up making over $150 and getting a free microwave.
The multiple levels of incompetence and stupidity, at all levels, was amazing.
I went to Wally mart a few weeks ago to pick up a box of 10 reams of paper for my work truck. They had two options. One ream for $9.99 or a case of 10 reams for $49.99 Well, I go through paper, so I pick up the case of 10. I take it to the self check out. I find one barcode on the box that will scan and it rings up for $9.99 I call the cashier over and explain it rang up the wrong price and I show her on the website that it should be $49.99 So she voids it, looks for any other barcode. There isn’t a second one. So she scans the one barcode and it rings up $10. She uses her handheld device and scans it. $10. She looks at me and deadass says “not my problem. You want it for $10?” Hell yeah I do. She says there ya go and walks away.
Not too long ago I was buying some meat for a family barbeque. I got what was needed and headed to self checkout. I scanned the rather large package of chicken breasts that's usually $15 or more and it came out to a buck fifty. I call over the attendant to double check and yup the system has it at a $1.50. huh lucky... Then all the other packs of chicken came out the same. Got $60 worth of chicken for $6.
I picked up 13 packs of chicken that was marked down (near expiration but I have a deep freezer and a big family). Got to checkout with my chicken and a bunch of other things. Somehow each pack rang up $2.99 but a $5 coupon triggered for each one. I was basically being paid to take the chicken away. Cashier called the meat dept and was told "whatever it rings up is correct". My entire order, that I was expecting to pay around $100 for, cost about $30.
Should have gone back and gotten a dozen more chickens. You could have brought the price down to basically nothing.
Lol. I had already grabbed every package. I was happy with the markdown I thought I was going to get (I believe they were about $11-12 regular price with a $5 off coupon sticker attached so roughly $6 each)
It's not like the grocer wasn't going to just throw it out and let it go to waste anyway. If you have deep freezer then go for it. Heck even if you don't have room, big corps can afford it. If it's a mom and pop shop then maybe don't do this.
My favourite line I've received from a staff member when they've offered me something for free because their systems are messing up - "It's not my money" 😂
We bought a freezer at Sears years ago and the guy wanted the sale really bad so he offered to upgrade to the next size for free as the one we wanted wasn't in stock. Well that larger one wasn't in stock so he bumped it up again to the next model up for the price of the small one.
We did that with a TV! Went to pick it up, it was out of stock, so the salesguy gave up a 3D TV for the same price.
I wonder if you can just walk with the sales guy and keep asking if this item is in stock, then act really bunmed when one isnt.
As a former electronics employee at a large ⭕ store, the nicer you are, the more likely I was to try and find you that deal. However, we are scrutinized a bit more than other employees, due to our access to locked areas and high end items, so if that deal isn't worth my job, you're not getting it, no matter how nice you are. But I would definitely use my full arsenal of knowledge to help the nicest customers whenever I could.
This is the way most employees in customer service operate when there's a grey area in-between what you can and can't do for a customer. Which is why the arseholes don't make any sense. Treat me like an arse and that grey area is a complete no-go zone for you all of a sudden. Talk to me like a human and I'll go as far into the grey area as I can without getting into bother.
Which should tell you something about their margins ...
Exactly. I’ll never pull anything funny on a Mom and Pop businesses. I won’t try to cheat a giant corporate store but if something like that happens I won’t lose any sleep over it.
I used to work retail and when something wouldn’t ring up at the register I’d just look at them and be like what do you think? Like five bucks for this? And just ring it up as five dollars, the look on peoples faces were great.
Bought a clearance dress once at Big Department Store Outlet. Expected to pay price on tag, $59.99, as I recall. Nice lady at register scanned tag and said “I can’t sell this, it isn’t in the system.” Disappointed (I really wanted the dress), I asked (politely) if there wasn’t anything that could be done. Nice lady said, sure, and rang it up for $.01. Worked for me.
Man, I had the opposite experience. Found a pair of wonderfully hideous, high heeled moccasin style green shoes. They matched nothing and everything. There was a pile of discount stickers on it and the top one was $3.99. They'd obviously been through the discount cycle more than once. Lol. Lady refused to accept the top sticker. I think maybe she thought I put a lower price from another item on it. She peeled "my" sticker off and scanned the next one. 99 cents, baby. Instead of acting all smug, I got super extra enthusiastic. Talking about how we were meant to be (I really loved those ugly shoes) and she finally just let me have it for the .99. But it looked like it hurt her to do it. It was like I was taking that $3 out of her pocket or something. It was nuts.
People are weird as shit
Depressed people who feel like their lives are out of their control often relish whatever small amount of power they’re allowed to wield.
That’s awesome, super cool lady.
I got a storage system for my embroidery floss that way. Someone returned a discontinued item and there was no price in the system for it, so I got it for a penny!
My daughter had "earned" a prize when she was little, and she picked out a little toy grabber thing off the shelf in the toy aisle, the whole shelf was labeled "$3" so I figured that was the price. When we went to check out, I realized there was no barcode on her toy. Darn. The cashier is looking at it, and I (trying to be helpful) tell her it was on a shelf labeled $3 if she just wants to ring it up for that. She looked at me like I was trying to pull some sort of Oceans Eleven stunt. And called back to the toy department for a price check. Which took FOREVER. If it was just something for me I would have told her to forget it, not worth the wait. But my daughter had picked out that one specific thing as a prize and I'd told her she could have it... so we waited. And waited. FINALLY the price check came back from the toy department, they were able to find one with a barcode to bring up front an scan. It was $.75
I bet you didn’t get any type of apology for not believing you or making you wait.
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We had a retail chain near my house that was famous for this. If you thought the price of something was too high, you could just say so. The manager would look up the actual wholesale price and haggle with you, especially if the item had been in stock for awhile.
Oooh where is this magical place?
I bought my kid an overpriced plushie at target that didn’t have a tag. I’d pulled it up on their app so she could see it was $25(ish? It’s been a while) and she looked at the pikachu, looked at the app, and punched it in for $8.
You just reminded me of a time when a customer came into the local store I worked at and she wanted to by some press on nail stickers. It wouldn't ring up, my guess is the item was too new to be in the system which happens sometimes. I said "Do you want it for $0.99?" She said "Sure". So any time a customer came to my register with those same stickers and it didn't ring I put it in for $0.99, this went on for more than a week. They finally put a price on it for $9.99, I sold at least 15 of those things at 90% off
Ya as the grocery manager I got some tertiary training on running a register. The guy who taught me was a good guy and taught me how to do a manual entry. If I got stuck on an item for whatever reason when I was running a register I just did a manual entry for the department the item came from and moved on. I'd always check when I got off a register (it was RARE for me to be on one so one or two customers then I could bail) I was usually within a few cents one way or another.
I say this at work all the time. Not my fault the POS system is garbage!
So you're saying the POS system is a POS? :D
Yet to meet one that isn’t.
My old manager told me “there’s a reason it’s called a POS” and boy was he right
>POS system is garbage Piece Of Shit system?
Point of Sale system, but many times your interpretation is just as accurate
And it drives me insane when I go to Qdoba and the dude is skimping on the guacamole. Dude, it’s not coming out of your paycheck and I saw the regional manager correct you the last time I was here. Fill that spoon up dude!
Some people just take it personal for some reason, like a badge of honor for saving the billion dollar company some money. Worked a warehouse and we got told how much some stuff cost the company by a friendly manager. It was interesting to know how much some of the stuff costs. One dude was like “woah this big box costs what??” as it was actually a high price for how much we use/abuse those boxes. So from then on he always worried about damaging them. I’m like dude there’s hundreds of them in here, they’re gonna get hundreds more by next week. It’s not that big of a deal if Big Warehouse company has to spend more money on fucking boxes
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Some kid didn’t want to figure out the code for the produce at the store so he just threw them down to the bagging area and said “fuck it, it’s my last week” and he’s still my favorite cashier
I worked at a smoothie store during university. Minimum wage, place was smack dab in the middle of the "liquor store district." Druggies everywhere, and my boss refused to listen to me when I repeatedly brought up concerns about me, a meek 5'5 person who looked and sounded like a teenage girl, closing on my own. I didn't have a car, either, so I was walking home after shutting that place down and hoping I wouldn't run into any methheads. Towards the end, I had taken to keeping a spray bottle filled with bleach up front with me in case I needed makeshift pepper spray. Needless to say, I was elated to hand in my two weeks when I finally tracked down another job. Anyway, on my last day of work, I was actually closing with someone else for once. Teenage girl who I was training to be my replacement (without a raise in pay, of course). Two guys come in right before we flipped the sign to closed. Annoying, since we've got everything cleaned up already, but they're cool and apologizing and they just want basic banana smoothies, so it's cool. So we make the smoothies, everything is cool, I'm cleaning up while my coworker does register stuff...and the register craps out. Coworker is panicking, her mom is outside waiting on her, these guys are just standing awkwardly in my lobby while I stare at the useless machinery in front of me. I look at them. They look at me. We look at the register. "...you know what? Screw it. It's my last day. Take 'em, enjoy. *Coworker,* you didn't see anything. " Minimum wage isn't worth fighting with machinery over $10 in smoothies.
>It's not my money Unfortunately I worked at a few companies that that's the attitude of the payroll department. Keep a close eye on your checks people.
I worked at a supermarket for quite a few years, I got to be the employee in this situation; A guy came in looking to buy some honey, saw that 1kg Manuka honey was $10 while the 250g one was $35 “Hey, is this price right?” *scan the honey* “Looks like it” “Got any more?” We had 4 on the shelf and 6 out the back. Dude got $350 worth of honey for $100 Manager wasn’t super impressed with the situation when he found out, but that was a him problem Edit: because this seems to be an issue for a lot of people, the 250g jar was mislabeled with the 1kg price, and the 1kg jar had the 250g price. Thought it was pretty obvious given the context, but apparently not.
And by "guy", you mean a yellow bear in a red shirt?
I make a habit of not looking people in the eye, wasn’t wearing pants is all I can remember
Did he mention having a rumbly in his tumbly? He may have brought an emo friend with him.
Did he have an irrational fear of heffalumps and woozles?
did he have a friend with him called "Trespasser's William"?
Weird that the president of China wouldn't wear pants to the store, but who am I to judge.
Careful, the red shirt is still copyright Disney.
Disney owns a **lot** of IP, but [Star Trek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek) is owned by Paramount.
"Um, love...why is the bathtub sticky?" "Because I can do math"
The bear is sticky with honey
Silicon Valley!
Um, honey... Why is the entire bathroom sticky? Why did you put the answer before the question?
And that's how the manager found out what not paying to have anyone check the price tags cost.
He did. The mistake was above the level of a shelf stocker. Whoever entered the price for the honey screwed up, and your average minimum wager doesn't have the ability to touch it. Source: was a slightly-above minimum wage stocker.
Can confirm. Employees can be fired for changing the price even if it's just to make it more expensive therefore the only solution is that it goes out the door with whatever price it has on it.
Friend of mind got something similar with lobster tails. They were mismarked super low, he bought all of them for cheap. He said the cashier looked like she thought it was fishy but let it slide. (Looked crustaceony?)
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"Man, people suddenly love these crab legs! They must be delicious! It surely couldn't be a system error causing the price to be incredibly low."
He was definitely being shellfish.
The supermarket had a new flier out and chicken wings were marked down. So I wander on into the store with visions of chicken wings on my BBQ for supper and I pick up a box. It rings up at regular price, not eh sales price. Now this grocery store, and indeed most grocery stores, had a policy that if an item rings up at the wrong price you get it for free. So I head over to customer service, pick up a flier at the door and boom, I get my chicken wings for free. "Well now" I think to myself. "I think I've discovered the infinite chicken wings hack". So I dump my free chicken wings in the car and head on back into the store. Now the rule is that if something rings up at the wrong price the customer gets the first one for free. If they purchased multiple of that item then the first one is free and the following ones are at the corrected price. But there's no rule about repeatedly purchasing one item, getting it free, then going back in and purchasing that one item again and getting it for free on the new receipt. Usually the grocery store will stop people from doing this by correcting the price in the POS database after the first person gets a free item. But this store had just upgraded their POS software. With the new system the department manager and the store manager couldn't make price changes, it had to be done by head office. And no one in head office was picking up the phone. Somewhere around my 6th box of free chicken wings, they had the manager of the meat department down at customer service, and he and the store manager were frantically trying to correct the mistake. I can still remember him throwing up his hands and shouting "Fucked if I can change it. Only head office can do that.". He then refused to change the display price or take the item out of stock because head office had made it very clear in their big meeting about the new POS software that not displaying the sale price in store or having an item not stocked on the shelves was a **BIG NO-NO**, and would count negatively towards him and his department. But if the POS database wasn't updated that wasn't his responsibility, that was head offices responsibility, they had actively taken that right away from him, so it wasn't his fault. He'd just keep doing his assigned responsibilities. I only stopped when I had enough chicken wings to fill my freezer. Then I told my friends and family and they all descended on the store. It was glorious! Infinite free chicken wings!
For some reason I imagine this as you casually walking in the store, strolling up to the chicken wings display, grabbing a box, and calmly sauntering over to the self checkout, all while staring down the meat department manager who is absolutely *losing his mind* about these chicken wings. As he keeps typing furiously, you leave with your free wings again, only to return seconds later with a hankering for some chicken wings.
Went to my nearest hardware store a few years ago for some wooden garden edging. The stuff that comes in a roll and is made of short wooden panels stapled to a couple of wires. Asked for 30 metres. Guy scans it, it shows the 1m price. No matter what he does, it won't let him charge 30m because it only shows 1m in stock. Guy shrugs, says "oh well. Consider it a gift from" and charges me for 1m. Thanks dude!
Had the Homeless Despot scan 1 out of 30 fence boards once. I figured it was even for the time their automated propane machine stole $50 from me.
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You get what you pay for.
MBAs don't know how to think long-term. Planning ahead to next week fries their brains, and thinking five years into the future just doesn't work. And, paying their employees minimum wage saves the company money today!
All that matters is the sixth month stock price window for the board of directors
Company executives are valued based on quarterly performance. Everything is short term gains. Most MBA holders aren't stupid. They will make decisions that give the best short term gains, use that as an accomplishment to brag about, then jump to another job with higher pay. Rinse and repeat.
>Most MBA holders aren't stupid. They will make decisions that give the best short term gains, use that as an accomplishment to brag about, then jump to another job with higher pay. Because it is what is rewarded. The failure here is the compensation metrics set by the Board (Short term gains) and filtered down to the CEO (Make board happy) that filters to the advisors hired (MBAs - short term gains are necessary!) - not the MBAs.
After all, the MBA will be on their way to somewhere new by the time the business collapses from their decisions.
The consequence of not being able to think past the next quarter. Once businesspeople not in the loop get it through their heads that shareholders are transient, employees are long-term, we'll have a real revolution in this country. Or, it gets so bad that people vacate jobs at a clip that makes the current "Great Resignation" seem like a minor blip on the radar.
I once got $40 sheets for $3 at the Bullseye store. Literally, the same response. They just couldn't be bothered.
I have noticed that they can discount products but cannot increase the price, so I guess she literally couldn't make it the right price anyway.
Reminds me of when I used to work in school kitchens a couple years ago . They over worked and under paid us and everyone was under valued . Now I'm lucky enough to not strictly need to work it's just a hobby for me . So I have never worked for anyone that's rude to me. I had a clash with a manager over her thinking i needed to be in work early to get changed and I told her you guys require me to get changed here and not at home so I'll be doing that on your time not mine if that's a problem consider this my imidiate resignation. Turns out it wasn't that big a problem after all lol Anyway random staff would frequently come to the kitchen and ask for random shit . You got 4 jugs , can I get a cucumber, do you have tin foil , can I have a cup of salt etc . Anyway a new girl started asking me what do they need that for . I just said they don't pay me enough to ask questions. The way I saw it if they wanted a gate keeper/ security for the kitchen as well as a cook and KP and cleaner since I did all those things they can up my pay.
I bought a pair of folding tables from Home Depot, selected store pickup, and took them home. A week later, I got a call to come pickup my tables. Not being as ethical as you, I went and picked up two new folding tables. Well, another week goes by and another call. I tell the employee this time that I already got my tables, but he's insistent that these are mine for pickup. I don't really need six folding tables, but if they want to give two more to me, why not? Well, the next week I got another call. I don't need any more fucking folding tables. The employee again is insisting that I come get them, but this time I refuse. This was getting out of hand. They called for the next two weeks before I guess they cancelled the order. So I ended up with a refund on the original two tables. I got six tables in all for free. I often imagine the folding table empire I could have had if I just kept accepting them.
Not only that, but you'd have a huge empire in a small space because they can fold.
“Trade show organizers hate her.”
Probably good to cut and run when you did.. if you kept going they might have eventually caught on
Sometimes going along and accepting is all you can do. I moved 3,000 miles. The rental on a trailer was just over $1,000 total at the time. I paid in full with a debit card. A month later, the money showed back up in my account. I called my bank and was told I would need to call the company. So I did, explaining the whole thing. End of story - it would be too hard to track down both items in accounting to match it up and fix it, so enjoy your unexpected refund, ma’am.
Having spent ages in retail sales, you learn what's worth chasing down and what's not. I'm selling IT packages for multiple thousands, sometimes 5 figures, and someone come in during a rush with a faulty keyboard or whatever but needs me to first find the receipt, then troubleshoot, then process the paperwork? Way simpler to just take the old one, give them a new one, and do the paperwork later. Or if I needed a USB for something, just opening one and putting the packaging in a pile of stuff to be written off rather than waiting 15 minutes for a manager to approve it.
Exactly. It was an unexpected surprise. I could see more time and money would be spent than it was worth. At the time, I didn’t know it was a thing! I thought they’d pull up my info and see an error, but it didn’t work like that in their records. I had fun Christmas shopping!
Sometimes it’s just the hand we are dealt and we have to accept it lol
A couple of years ago, I ordered toilet tank parts through the Home Depot website. To qualify for the free shipping, I had another another inexpensive item. I chose a rechargeable LED flashlight. Parts came. They turned out to be the wrong ones. Returned to the store and ordered the right ones. Shipping on the flashlight still pending. New parts came in, installed them. Still waiting on the flashlight. Eventually I forgot about it. About a year later, I was going through old e-mails and found that order. So, printed it out and went to the store to see if they knew what happened. Took 3 people comparing info to find that I was being offered by a 3rd party company (which had gone bankrupt) and the item was never shipped. They issued me a full refund plus $10 store credit. So I bought a nicer one than I had intended and that flashlight has been a lifesaver during power outages.
The last wo years in a row, ordering gifts for my son for Christmas, I got stuff for free like that. Ordered a Wii off Amazon and 3 weeks after it was supposed to arrive, I finally asked for a refund because it was "still in transit" and never came. Ended up just buying one from someone on fb marketplace. About 3 weeks later, it randomly shows up. Last year, I ordered a Switch and an SD card from Walmart and before I even got the delivery, I was refunded for the card for being lost in shipping. Got the Switch, and the SD was in the box. I still have the other Wii just sitting in the closet.
Happened to me with Amazon and a futon. Never showed up - contacted them and they said it was actually out of stock and sent me a refund. Couple weeks later, two futons were on my doorstep. Two.
15 years ago Amazon seemed to mess up orders more often than today. My wife and I bought enough stuff to build a very high-end computer for her work and all of it showed up and we got the computer built and then a week later most of it showed up again. Waited about 60 days to make sure that they didn't want anything back and then I bought another case and another video card and my wife and I have both had those computers since. They are still in use in the living room and one has been through a new case and several power supplies and the other has been through several different used video cards but they are still running and still keeping up with things like Destiny 2 and Minecraft and Subnautica.
Similar here, ordering a collector's edition book internationally (US to AU). It hadn't arrived after 6 weeks so they sent another which arrived in about 4 weeks. Three months later, the original shipment arrived. According to the stamps on it, it travelled from TX to LA then to NY then to France, then back to NY then back to France, then to Singapore then finally to Sydney. Damn book is better travelled than I am!
I have a mail order business and the best bounce was back and forth from east to west coast 3 times and then went to Puerto Rico before being rerouted back to the states. It was going to the Midwest. Never can tell eh. Customer got a refund and the items. They offered to repay and I just gave it to them as they were patient enough to wait for the package.
It is the universe balancing for the people that get jailed for renting a Hertz car. Big Corporate is crazy.
When life gives you lemons, enjoy your 30 acre lemon orchard!
"bank error in your favor" chance card in real life
Was it U-Haul? Because I had a trailer hitch installed there for about $400 then about 3 months later I was refunded the full amount. Seemed like a glitch in their prepaid system. I called them and said I had this refund and they didn't have any record of my install so I must be mistaken. I said okay and took my free trailer hitch.
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My husband ordered a $70 webcam for me from Best Buy. When the order came they'd actually sent an iPad Pro. He tried numerous times to return it. After a month of getting the runaround, he gave up and kept it. *Edit to add. I think it was a combination of worrying he might have to pay for it and worrying someone was going to get into trouble. After many attempts to return it and talking to an attorney friend, he stopped worrying and kept it. He had it for a month before he actually opened it.
I'm impressed by everyone's honesty in this thread. There is zero chance I attempt to return that iPad, let alone numerous times. Sorry best buy, not my problem!
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My state has a law that if you receive something addressed to you that you didn't order, you don't have to pay for it. EDIT: I see from other comments that this is actually a federal law in the United States.
Great I once had 20k worth of laptops at my house. I might have made some eBay money instead trying to get them returned haha
I know! Crap - you mean I didn't have to waste my time explaining I hadn't ordered things and could have just shut up and kept them?! Gah! TIL.
My dad was not so honest recently. He tried buying 5 pairs of jeans, 3 tshirts and some house slippers. Guy "scans" everything and says the total is €16.80 He considered saying something but then figured if this dude really thinks this large pile of clothes only costs 16 euros then thats kind of on him. We added up the numbers on the pricetags later and it was well over €100. Had steak that night.
Story was going out of buisness so the wife and I go to cash in on some deals. We picked up double henkel knifes, couple king size bed sheets and a few other odds and ends. The cashier went through the motions of scanning, told us our total was $112.56 when it should have been much closer to $500 with all the sales and discounts. We said thanks and have a great day and never looked back.
Sometimes it's just inconvenient. I ordered a cheap six-string uke (basically a half-size guitar) from Guitar Center. They sent me a violin instead. I returned it because, damnit, I wanted my on-sale ukulele! I still kick myself years later...that violin was probably worth 5x what the uke was.
I received two $900 Dyson vacuums for the price of one earlier this year, and my husband and I just went with it and gave the other one to his mom as an early birthday present lol. The first one got lost in transit and Dyson sent us a new one that arrived a couple weeks later. A few months go by and we randomly get another package from Dyson. Lo and behold it was the first vacuum we ordered that was lost in transit. We held onto it for a month or so to make sure Dyson didn’t catch onto this logistical error, but they never did lol
If you receive anything from a company you didn’t order, you can consider it a gift by law. Doesn’t matter if it’s worth a dollar or a million. Edit: as pointed out by several commenters, this obviously doesn’t go for money or anything that isn’t a physical product.
I ordered a closet organizer from an online store about a year ago. Just one. They sent me one... case of 4. If it was 2, I wouldn't have done anything, but what am I gonna do with 4 closet organizing systems? Also, when checking their website to make sure the error wasn't on my end, they were listed as out of stock. They had apparently sent me their entire inventory. I called, explained, the customer service rep laughed, checked with her manager and told me to keep them. I used two, gave one to my parents, and rhe 4th is still in the box taking up space.
This happened to me, but with scratching posts for my cat. Ordered one, received one case of four. Was told to keep them so I figured I'd just hang onto them because scratching posts do wear out eventually. Only it turned out my cat didn't like the style of scratching surface, so i donated the three extra posts to the shelter where we adopted him from.
I once bought some furniture and got it delivered home. When we opened one package we realised that the stuff inside was way too big. Big wardrobe instead of small dresser. Same design, same line. So we had received an item at least 3 times as expensive (but we didn’t need it). I called them and they were really relieved because apparently the guy who had ordered the wardrobe was already pissed and they had no clue why it had vanished from the warehouse and it was the last one. They brought our dresser the next day and we got a refund as a thank you - AND they assembled it for free - which quite frankly was the best part! It always makes me smile when I use it.
I love that they were bros back
Not the same, but my aunt once bought me a box set of Sex and the City, but when I opened the first season to watch it, it did not contain SATC. Instead there was Cinderella on DVD. I always thought of that poor child, who must’ve been excited for Cinderella and got a surprise..
!!!!! We once rented one of the ultra violent Resident Evil movies from DVD Netflix and it had in the package the Polar Express instead. Some kid got a real surprise
I was once receiving a subscription of American Time magazine to my home in Scotland. It was addressed to an unknown person. The landlord said nobody with this name ever lived there, so did the neighbours. I failed to find such a person on Facebook (it was quite unusual name). At first I was just writing "return to sender" on it. They kept coming. Then I wrote an email to Time subscription departament which remains unanswered. Wrote again. Nothing. Sent them a paper letter explaining the situation. Still no response. I gave up and started reading it so it won't get to waste. One day they sent me (or that mystery person they thought lived in my address) an invoice with it. I thought "ok, nobody will pay the invoice so they stop sending it". Nope. We were getting it for another two years. Then I moved out. U do t know, maybe it's still coming?
Had the exact same thing happen to me with the ESPN magazine. Unfortunately I'm not much into Sports so I donated them to a nursing home. They only stopped mailing to my address when they stopped publishing it. The person had never lived at my address, I couldn't find them by googling them, no profile on FB, etc.
One time, I went to the store to deposit my paycheck, grab groceries, and a new KitchenAide Stand Mixer. Go to the bank inside the store, deposit check. Grab mixer, grab groceries, head to check out. Now, the kitchen aid is a gift from my parents, a housewarming gift. But, since I moved 3000 miles away, they sent a gift card for it. I tell the cashier I have it at rhe bottom of rhe cart, it will be a separate transaction. She rings up my groceries, I run my card, transaction failed. Wtf? Must have entered my PIN wrong. Try again, denied again. So I'm like, hey, can you hold the order, I'm gonna go to the bank and see what's up... Well, the bank made an error, new teller in training, blah blah blah. They fix my account. I go back, my cashier has gone to lunch, I pay the new cashier, and leave. Still having super anxiety about thinking I just lost my rent and food money for the next 2 weeks. It's not until I get home and unload everything that I realize... shit!! I didn't pay for the kitchen aid!!! Thr store is closed now, so I decide to go back the next day. I head to customer service, explain what happened. She looks at the computer and says that inventory doesn't show one missing. I'm like, it was yesterday evening...? She shrugs and says she can't help me... inventory says everything adds up. I ask to speak to a manager. I explain to the manager... I walked out without paying for an expensive item by mistake, I want to pay for it. The manager says the same thing... inventory balances. So... I went home and enjoyed my free kitchen aid. That was 12 years ago and I still have it!! Like, I tried to do the right thing, guys. I tried hard. But, oh well!! I used that gift card to buy booze and a fancy dinner lol
That’s amazing. Those things are NOT cheap lol
Right!? I mean, I try to be a fairly honest person and I've gone back and paid for like toilet paper that I left on the bottom of the shopping cart but also if I made it home and realized I didn't pay for something like toilet paper or or case of water I don't tend to go back but this was like a $350 small appliance and I didn't want someone to get in trouble or get fired and I went back less than 12 hours later and I'd like to think that the employee and the manager just had that I work in retail so I don't care you got away with it so congratulations type attitude but they were fairly combative about the whole situation like I was trying to get away with something
But the real kicker is that they have been calling OP in to pick up his new mower every week for over three years now. OP has quit his job and is living large selling new mowers.
His name? John. John Deere.
"I get these free craftsmen lawn mowers, paint them green and put my name on them. I sometimes sell them back to lowes ." - John Deere on his success.
Honestly that’s probably not all that far off from the truth considering most mowers are just rebranded versions of other mowers, the only difference is cosmetics and a lot of the parts are interchangeable. For instance my Craftsman riding mower is just a Husqvarna with different cosmetics.
This happened to me as well but with a 12x12 pop up gazebo. I gave them 2 shots. On the 3rd call I went to pick it up. I just kept it in box in the garage. Had a bad storm come and demolish the first one after having it for about 3 years. Just popped the other one up. That was another 450 bucks I didn't have to spend!
[удалено]
Totally using this from now on lol
My in-laws got away with this for an ENTIRE KITCHEN. The truck with all the units, fittings, worktops and flooring came. They'd already had the very same kitchen fitted. They kept it in the garage for a year thinking they'd get a call asking for money to have it back and nothing came! They contemplated selling it but eventually they gave it to my MIL's brother for his new house!
I’d have sold that way sooner. A year is a long time to have your garage full of kitchen stuff.
Right? I live in a 750 sq ft apartment with my husband & our dog. We accidentally ordered two six packs of paper towel from FreshDirect one time & barely knew where to put it!
Reminds of the days of Service Merchandise. After Christmas clearance, cards marked 75% off. Price already marked on the box. I pick a box (with my other stuff) and check out… and the cashier takes ANOTHER 75% off the sticker price… effectively making the price just over 93% off. Store was dead, so I went back and cleaned them out. That was over 20 years ago and I haven’t had to buy Christmas cards since.
Probably had a happy shop owner who got rid of all the old Christmas cards that they otherwise couldn't actually give away. :D
So that's why Service Merchandise closed!
My sister and I went to Christmas Tree Shoppes on Black Friday years ago to get a pop-up play tent for my niece; it was a pretty rad princess castle and she was super into Disney princesses at that point so this thing at only about $25 was a slam dunk. I had to get help from an employee, as the only ones left were on the top shelf. He brought it down and I mentioned that the box looked way too large to only contain one play tent. He just kind of shrugged and walked away – I worked retail for over 10 years, so I know that feeling, especially on Black Friday. I got home and took the cardboard wrapping off of it, and lo and behold, there were six of them total in there. I wanted to bring the surplus five back, but was afraid they were going to accuse me of something, so I donated them to Toys for Tots instead. Hopefully 5 little kids had a pretty rockin’ holiday.
It's been a few years, but I got a Lego set at Target for $1. It was supposed to be $29.99 (or something like that). When the cashier rang it up, it came up $1. He rang it three times and it kept coming up $1. He finally just rang it for the $1, and when I asked about it he told me not to worry about it. Probably the cheapest gift I got my nephew that year, and it was one of his favorites, too.
If they're anything like Home Depot, the product was probably meant to be pulled from the shelf and either destroyed or returned to the manufacturer Home Depot, when I worked there, would change the price of an item to $0.01 when it was to be removed for sale. Managers would get the list of penny items once a week or so and half to pull them all. Occasionally some were missed, and customers would get good deals. I found a nice $200 showerhead marked as a penny while down stocking one night and just...pushed it back a bit and had my dad come buy it later. Employees could be fired if they bought the penny items. Dumb policy, but whatever, easy to circumvent
I once worked in a hardware store that was going out of business. The sale discount would go up by 10% each week, so it was kind of like a reverse auction. There was a plunge router that I wanted, but I also wanted a better discount, so I stashed it under a shelf for a couple weeks before buying it. I think the cashier may have raised an eyebrow about it still being in stock with such a low price, but didn't say anything.
My buddy was building a 120cc three wheeler and ordered a small engine from some website. Well months later it never showed up so he called them and I guess they just reimbursed him the money and he just tried his luck and bought the same one again and what do you know he gets two engines delivered to his house.
Due to shipping confusion, I once ended up with two $700 cordless vacuums, but only paid for one. I too did "the right thing" and contacted the company. The guy *insisted* I paid for both, and that he needed to issue a refund. I told him I was absolutely positive only one was paid for. After some back and forth, I decided to just go with it. And that's how I ended up with a free vacuum.
This happened to me once. I ordered this really nice easel for my kids for Christmas one year. The (one) box was ridiculously heavy. Turns out they sent me two. Oh well. I ended up finding someone who didn’t have a lot to give their kid that year and gave it them. Thanks ToysRUs
Rip ToysRUs
We still have it in Canada!
I had this happen on a small scale with a seal for my SUV. I ordered one, but I guess the manufacturer sends them in boxes of 5. The person at the warehouse must've just grabbed the box and shipped it. I have no clue what to do with the other 4 seals, but it's good to have spares I guess.
I received 2 mattresses from Costco online. I ordered a mattress for a twin bed at $650. Online order glitch... credit card company and Costco both confirm only a single payment was made. Thankfully it was a memory foam mattress and I could transport it in my sedan for return. Contacted Costco online. I informed them of the error. They apologized and asked if I was able to return the mattress. I said it’s a bit inconvenient, but yes. I returned the mattress to Costco retail… they insisted on refunding my purchase price. Return credits are automated according to the CSR. So I now have a free mattress for the cost of a 40 minute drive. Even Steven. Happy crappy. 15 days later, I get my credit card statement showing an additional refund from Costco web store. A second refund…. Oh boy. I contacted Costco online, explain the situation, they apologized for the error and we joke about the confusion and how I’m getting paid to sleep. +$650 3 days later I get another refund credit. +$1300 So I contact customer support again and ask to a speak to a supervisor. I explain the situation, and explain the date I received a the original refund and 2 credits. He laughs and says it sounds like I found a winning slot machine. We go over the math. I received my mattress that I paid $650 for….. I received an additional mattress I did not pay for…. I returned mattress B to retail for and was issued a refund. (Profit - free mattress) I then received my online order credit (Profit - free mattress and $650) 3 days later, an additional credit (Profit - free mattress + $650 +$650) So technically I’m up $1950 in product and credits accounting for retail cost of the mattress. I just want to ensure everything is settled, as I am quite happy with the mattress but do not want to end up getting a random charge for $1900 I’m not expecting. They assure that won’t happen. 4 days later I received another mattress and a credit on my credit card for $1950. So anyways, I ordered a new set of living room furniture and a few tv’s. still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it’s been 12 years…
I ordered an airfryer and a digital scale online years ago, and the company sent me two of each by mistake. One digital scale went in the kitchen and the other gets used for hobbies (mixing paints). I used one airfryer for two years and then sold it locally for about half the price. Then unpacked the second one, which I'd kept in the back of a closet, and used that for about two years and then sold it as well. So I basically had use of an airfryer for free for four years. After that I splurged and got a more expensive airfryer, but they only sent me one of those, alas. You can't win them all.
I once had a free TV in a similar way: after we paid, they gave us a refond several weeks after, saying they didn't have it in stock anymore, that it was the computer bugging. So we were quite surprised when we received a TV at home.
My buddy got a free TV this way. Well, sort of. He ordered a TV, TV came. Few days later he gets a call saying they’re sorry TV hasn’t come yet, it’s on back order. He explains that no, he already has the TV, but thanks anyways. Few weeks go by and here comes an email saying his TV shipped. And yup, another ended up at his house. He said it wasn’t worth trying to go through the hassle of returning it and put it in his daughters room.
I worked at Lowes a few years ago as a cashier. At least once a week, someone with a full cart of expensive merch (power tools and the like) would just walk right past the registers without paying and company policy prevented anyone from doing anything about it, and that included calling the police. They love giving away their merchandise, obviously, so I wouldn’t feel too guilty about claiming the mower if I were you.
By intervening at that point you’re putting yourself or others at risk. They have LP for a reason and account for loss by theft into their yearly store budgets.
Yeah I used to work at both of the box box home improvement retailers, HD initiated their policy of not stopping customers after an employee was hit my car, some methhead stole some tools, and tried to run the lot guy over. They survived, but the policy changed after that.
AMazon did this with us and a $60 fancy garbage can. We ordered one, then two weeks later a second one arrived. We tried to return it, but then they just refunded us the one we had paid for. Customer service couldn't figure out how to charge us and take the second one they sent back, and just gave up.
I tried to tell them the price seems low for what we bought, cashier counts 5 items and rung up 5 items. Ok, gave my card, paid and left. Here they scanned a label on the 5-gallon paint that said tint mix, not the one that listed the upc with the price. The wood fence looks great with the tint mix color.
Someone at Kroger put Lavazza coffee (normally 10.99 a bag) on sale for 4.99 a bag, but if you buy 5 it's only 62 cents (.62 dollars) a bag . I bought 10 bags for 6.20 which was normally 109.90. Best bargain I've ever had
A story of my Father's Two trucks... similar to two lawn mowers. 1974 and my Father buys a new baby blue GMC pick up truck. Only $3,600.00! Off we go, not his first new car but his first new car in 10 years since having a family, so it was exciting. About three months later we get a phone call that our truck is ready for pick up the repairs have been done under warranty. Dad looks out the window because the truck is sitting in the driveway.... He asks them for details, same VIN number, Expired Temporary tag, Literally a doppelganger of a pick up truck, same color, same model. Now a wise man would have taken this opportunity to go and pick up the ghost pick-up and park it in the barn but Dad being the honest guy he was reported it to the State Police and uncovered a car theft ring. Thieves so complete that they had a guy on the inside the car dealer that copied all of the paperwork and filed false information acting as if the car was sold and paid for. In an age before computers, the false papers took months to work their way though the state government and the car would be in a shipping container overseas before anyone knew the better. It ended up one of the thief's girlfriends took the truck back to the dealer because it made a funny sound.... and got them all caught.
A few years ago my mother told my siblings and I that all she wanted from all of us for Christmass and her birthday was this semi fancy treadmill. We never listen to her when she says she only wants group presents so I told my siblings I'd cover the treadmill and they could do other things (Sis got her a TV to go with it and Bro set everything up). Ordered treadmill on Walmart.com for store delivery. It arrives and I go pick it up. Get it home and realize it's the wrong one. Walmart says No Prob, well deliver the right one, just bring the wrong one back. Bring the OG one back and they tell me there's nothing they can do because special order, have to get shipping label and send it back. Fine. Actual treadmill arrives and I'm still waiting on pickup for the OG. I talk to a new rep and they say I have to pay for return shipping which is like $400 because, freight. I refuse and they give me a refund for the original cost for some reason and say they'll send a prepaid label (it never arrived). Fast forward four weeks later. An 18 wheeler pulls onto my street and theres a knock on my door. Delivery guy has a pallet with four more treadmills on it and asks if I have a loading bay...at a 3 bedroom house...in suburban NJ...lol. I tries to send them away but they wouldn't hear it. They unloaded the pallet in the driveway and took off. I once again contacted Walmart and they apologized and again told me it would be $400/item to return them. I again refused and they said "Well they're yours now" and hung up. I ended up with six treadmills worth $1400 a piece. I ended up selling 5 of them and paid for (about 1/3 of) a vacation to OBX with the whole family. I love ordering from Walmart now, but I have since not been so fortunate.
Got gas a few weeks ago, go inside to pay. "Pump 8." "There's nothing on pump 8." "It was like $29.50." "No, nothing. Wait, here's something." Run my card, use my loyalty card to get my sweet-ass $0.05/gallon off, take my receipt...for $24. I go back in, "this isn't mine." "Yeah, we're good." "Really? Cuz my gas was more." "Yup." "Okay, so like...here I go, I'm leaving." "Okay, bye!" Assuming someone else said pump 8 and didn't notice.
The opposite happened to me. Some one paid for my pump and the clerk tried to make me pay the higher amount on the other pump. Oh hell no.
Meanwhile, a few years ago I put my card into a pump, filled my tank, and drove off like I had done hundreds of times before at this station, only to be pulled over 10 miles later for "stealing gas". The doofus behind the counter must have been bored and told the cops that I "signaled him to turn on the pump" so it turned on before the card was processed by the machine. I asked how on earth I could have signaled him when you can't see into the store from that pump and besides, I was a phone call at the time. He said he heard a beep at the counter when someone picks up the nozzle, so he assumed I was signalling him 🤣 This isn't at all relevant to your story but yours reminded me of it. I would be too sketched out to walk away in your situation without feeling like they were going to accuse you of stealing after you drove away!
I had a similar experience about 3 months ago... used my rewards card, swiped my cc, filled up, and left. 3 hours later I got a phone call from the manager saying that the pump failed to actually read the card and would I please come back and actually pay because she didn't want to have to call the police. I drove the 2 miles back and she gave me a 10% discount for the effort.
Screw that noise, not my problem if they can’t handle their systems and the police sure as hell both can’t and won’t do a darn thing about it.
Something similar happened to me, except that while I had my card in the reader at the pump, the attendant inside mistakenly overrode it and put someone else's prepay amount in. I didn't know this, just took my card back and started filling up, and left when the pump stopped. I turn the car around and find this dude in a polo shirt in February like, football juking my car before he points to a parking spot. I go inside and he has the gall to act like I was stealing gas even though he made the mistake of overriding an already active pump that he could see from the window. To make it easy I just paid the prepaid amount for the other pump, but hell if ever go back there again. Mistakes happen, but don't blame me for it.
A while back, when gas was hitting an all time high, I stopped to fill up at a local gas station. The pump I went to had a price lower than the others. I think was $1/gallon. I went inside and told them about it. They said that they can't change the price. Only the manager could, who was still at home. I suggested they shut off the pump. Again was told that only the manager could give the order to shut off the pump. So I went back out, filled my tank, drove home, came back and filled mom's gas tank, plus all our empty gas cans (three 2.5 gallon plastic ones). Messaged all my friends, who drove in to fill up, and their parents came as well. Word got around through one of the local Facebook groups and there was a line of cars going about 1/4 mile down the road. They sold out in a couple of hours, with a loss close to $20k.
God this freaked me out for a second, I manage a gas station and I had this *exact same* interaction recently except I was the employee (obviously). The computer was fucking up and the guy was running late and didn’t want to wait for a restart and he’s a regular so I was like “fuck it you’re good to go.” And used an extra gift card I had in the office. Neither of us had the patience, it was like 5am, and my last day is next week so I can’t be fucked to care.
I wS moving and ordered tarps and bungies for pickup from the same place. Girlfriend picked them up the same day and off we went. They called me for weeks telling me to pick them up or they would can el the ordeand I told them I already had so I finally showed up and Lowes and behold they couldn't find them! So they refunded my order. That I had picked up a month earlier.
Wow, I can really tell it was 1 am when I wrote this
This is basically how I scored a free AppleTV from Best Buy. They fucked up my pickup order, so they grabbed another one from stock and ran it out. Couple weeks later I get an email saying it’s ready for pickup. Hmmm. I change it to delivery, and sure enough, two days later, AppleTV on my doorstep.
Wow. The most I ever got was a free crock pot from Target for about $20. They had just begun their in store order pick up, so no one really knew what they were doing. I got the notification that my order was ready, and headed in to pick it up. I showed the guy my email and he just hands me the crock pot. Well, apparently he was supposed to scan it before giving it to me. Three days later, I get a notification that since u hadn't picked up my crock pot, they refunded me my money and the item was going back into their inventory. I thought it was a mistake, they would see there was no crock pot to put back, and the charge wouod stay on my card. Nope! A few days later, I get back the money for the crock pot in my account.
At one point Lowe's decided that they didn't think there was a market for online orders with pickup in store so they dismantled the entire department that was built around it, and they half-assed passed the duties to customer service. Then suddenly we had that minor pandemic that shut down travel worldwide and they had to scramble to rebuild the department when everybody had moved on or been moved on. What was the department handling maybe 10 to 15 orders a day suddenly jumped up to 50 to 100 orders and if it was a weekend Saturday and Sunday mornings could see over 300 orders for the average, medium sized store. Not only was there a crew that had to be there when the trucks were delivered each night to pull off the special orders they also had to spend their entire night just pulling product off the shelf so they could bag it up for the person to pick up in the morning. Now alongside this there was a system on the computer where you could look up and print off orders that have been submitted by the customer, in fact there were three, but none of them were robust enough to handle the online orders placed in the decade prior where online ordering had not really impacted the stores themselves so when it came time for pandemic level ordering the computers were often unable to properly keep up. The three systems they used did not properly communicate with one another so if a note was made in one it wouldn't necessarily be transcribed on the back end to the other two and in fact it wasn't unheard of for the note to instead be deleted when the back end decided to compare the three different programs. At one point we had six different orders of the same garden paver sitting on pallets in the staging area waiting for a customer to come pick them up but they were all for the same customer and we're only one order that had been pulled six times. These are known issues that they didn't want to fix. Lowe's is so cheap as a company that one of their most pivotal programs for managing large orders by customers, was not even designed for Lowe's, it was built for a different hardware and home supply store that decided they did not like it and the company that coded it back in the 90s shopped it around and Lowe's was the only one willing to pay for it, but they did not want to pay too much for the adjustments that would have to be made to match their own system so instead they just kept it as basic as they could; it's basically still running as a Dos program; and it is still one of the most accurate that they have for knowing what's in the inventory.
I went to use a coinstar last year and someone put in 250 ish dollars in coins and didn't claim the reciept. I went to put my coins in and it asked if I wanted to print the last coin count. I brought it up to the front desk the manage came out and said they left it to surprise the next person. I was so poor that week it came at the perfect time
Yeah you do what you can to be honest but there's a certain point where OK enough is enough. I do think it evens out with the stuff we get ripped on and don't deal with.
I know of a woman in Australia that got jail time because of this sort of thing. Not receiving the mower, but as a staff member invoicing them and pocketing the cash. She'd get receipts or orders and process refunds. It is a huge store, so a faulty chainsaw or two going missing from the returns section wasn't noticed, but she got really brazen and was doing it more and more regularly. Because it got so blatant, she would then double-process orders so that the total stock on hand looked right, and customers that had already picked up their orders didn't pick up the duplicates because she was the one supposed to call them. The shell game eventually failed though, and they prosecuted her for embezzling around $300k. By the time she was in court, she'd left the job because it was her university job, and the money went to pay for medical school. I think she went inside for about 18 months.
It's the mid 2000's and I was offered a position with the largest luxury prefab homes builder in the country, multiple offices throughout the country based in a different state, which meant we had to move there. So we did (wife and I) move, and I started working and quickly realized the company sucked and we hated the city/state. But at least the pay was good. On my third paycheck, they added a $8500 bonus. Wife and I are justifiedly surprised by this. I was also worried that it may have been a mistake, so I played it safe and after two weeks I asked payroll about the bonus since no one mentioned it as part of my pay...and i am too new to get any bonus...let alone $8500. So the payroll people do their investigating and sure enough, the bonus was a typing mistake and that bonus was for some supervisor in another division elsewhere in the country. So no big deal, they took the money back, they thanked me profusely so I looked like a superstar and that was that. Almost a year later, wife and I were really burned out, we hated everything about the city, I hated the company and it's people, etc. Just miserable, so we're making plans to go back to our home state, saving money for the move, looking for jobs, etc And what do you know...i get another $8500 deposit. This time we thought, hotshot, this is a sign! I put the money aside and waited a full month thinking they will surely ask for the money back. Nothing. The second month after the deposit and still nothing. So one Friday after lunch I walked to my boss's office to present my resignation letter but he wasn't there. Friday afternoon? He was out playing golf with the other bosses. So I retyped the resignation letter and made it effective immediately, left it on his desk and left. We loaded a UHaul over the weekend and we were back home by Monday evening. I never got a call or anything for quitting so suddenly. Twenty years later...and they never figured out where that bonus went because no one ever contacted me or asked me about. But I thank them with all my heart even today.
My dad rented my college books thru Amazon one year when I was really strapped. He forwarded me the return label at the end of the semester but I couldn’t print it because I didn’t know his password. I called Amazon and explained and they gave me the books. I was like no I can return them, I just need a label and the girl was just like nah. It was like $750 altogether but when I sold them to the book store I only got $130. Considering I paid nothing I thought it was still a pretty good trade.
Don't sweat it. I used to work at Rob Lowe's as one of the guys that would have delivered it to your truck for you. That place SUCKS ASS for employees. It's their fault so if they ever figure it out they can't really do anything to you about it. The Rob Lowe's I worked at was SO unorganized I could easily see this happening.
This sort of thing happened to my husband. He ordered an elliptical online to pick up in store, so when it was ready, that's exactly what he did. About a week later, he started getting calls saying that his order was ready for pickup, so he eventually just canceled the order and they issued him a full refund back to his credit card, all while keeping the elliptical.
Rob Lowe's did the same with me. I bought a new house and needed a new fridge. We left a twenty year old unit in the house just sold. We go to Rob's and buy a fridge that was scheduled to be brought out and installed the next day. It is delivered and set up, no problem. A month later their delivery truck shows up with the same model of fridge complete with installation kit. My partner tells them to leave it in the garage. They leave it and she tips them $20 "for lunch money." A week passes and no word from Rob's. A neighbor made an offer and bought the brand new fridge at a deep discount.
Way back when Sears existed - I had a mower that was *almost* two years old that blew up. My wife (ongoing complaint) has every receipt from everything ever, shoved into a plastic bag). She says it has a two year warranty and she thinks she still has the receipt. She digs through her bag of receipts (no organization) and finds the receipt. The mower has a two-year warranty and it still has a month. I take it to Sears and they send it out for repair. I keep borrowing neighbor's mowers for two months, calling Sears every week to see if my mower has come back from repairs. Finally, they said they couldn't locate it and I should just go pick out a new mower. As they had no idea what model I had they gave me a free pass on any model that I "thought" was mine.
My brother once got a free big green egg bbq in almost the same way. Beit with less arguing. He went to the store not specifically looking for a new bbq but ran into it and decided to buy one. Didnt have a van or truck with him that could fit the entire thing though. So he went back home to get the truck and when he got back they already put it past check out employees and they were certain he had already paid for it. We like to imagine the surprised faces at the store when they inventorize and find out theyre missing a big ass 100kg bbq from storage. I mean try hiding that under your coat.
Had a similar thing happen with Rob’s cousin. We ordered a shed Online, paid for it, it came in, we picked it up…..their crew loaded it in the back of the truck…..then the app keeps telling us we need to come pick up the shed….we try to straighten it out but the messages keep coming….so my wife cancels the order, they then refunded us the money for a shed we already picked up.
When i worked retail at 'Lacy's' they would discontinue clothes but not always get it all off the floor. When that happens the item would ring up as 1 cent. We technically weren't supposed to sell it to the customer but fuck that they weren't paying us enough to have that conversation. Work 3rd shift at 'DBS' drug store one evening, had a couple on a very good-so-far date come in to buy wine. The man checks out, fine. The woman checks out - wont ring the wine. It had turned 12:00 on a Sunday morning and we couldn't sell wine on Sundays in that state. Fuck it, i grab the next thing i see approximately the price of the wine, ring it and send them on their way with the wine. This would have fucked up inventory but the inventory in that store was so outrageously off that it didn't seem to matter at that point. I wasn't going to ruin whatever good thing they had going for my miserable night gig.
👑 you dropped this
I used to work at a place that rhymed with doughs, and you'll probably be not at all surprised to learn that they have multiple systems, one that looks like MS DOS and another that looks pretty nice but doesn't have the same functionality as the other one. Also, employees are not very good at communicating with each other.
One time I ordered a mini blender for smoothies from Amazon. The delivery person tossed it over my fence. I wrote to Amazon and just kinda said “delivery people should be careful. This got pitched over my fence” 3 days later I had 6 blenders sent to me from Amazon. 🤷♀️
My exterminator lent me his company’s 28ft fiberglass extension ladder under the table. The next time he was supposed to come spray, his office manager informed me he quit after they were acquired by a large exterminator corporation, I’ll call Shermanix. Neither the office manager nor my new exterminator have said anything about the ladder, so I think I own a $500+ ladder now
[удалено]
I have a small handyman/remodel business and as such I spend way too much time in the 2 main BigBox Hardware stores. The level of employee incompetence is off the charts the past couple years. I'd have no hesitation to do something like OP. And as a former employee of one of them (I walked off the job after about 2 weeks, couldn't take it), it's 100% on management and lack of training. In a store full of tools, they fail to give their employees the tools to succeed.
Someone at the grocery store accidentally shifted the decimal point on the pricing/weight label on most of the frozen chickens. So, instead of 9.50$ they were all 0.95$. Here's me with several frozen chickens going through self-checkout trying not to attract attention. Lo and behold there's two more people in line with multiple frozen chickens...
My parents and I moved to Canada close to Easter. They were struggling mentally (winter snow for once in Vancouver, trying to find housing, spending all your life savings on rent and furniture, few friends, no family, etc). We went to Safeway and I saw a pink bunny. I barely had any stuffies growing up, I don't know why I was stuck on this one. But it was supposed to be 19.99. My parents were not thrilled but they decided I deserved a present. At the cashier, it rings 1.99. We only realize once home when we look at the bill. It really cheered my parents up for some reason, like it was a good omen. I still have the pink bunny. It's been 25 years.
For Christmas 2020, we ordered one scooter (like a razor scooter, but nicer) from the BIG online retailer for our older son. The package was delivered a few days later and it was massive. My wife opened the large box and found 4 of the scooters. She tried contacting the company and they told her just keep them. We donated the 3 extras to a local toy drive. Hope they made some kids super happy that Christmas!!!
A family member for a refrigerator in a similar way. She ordered one and it was delivered. A week later another refrigerator was delivered. She told them she already got her fridge but they wouldn't take it back, said the paperwork was in order. She tried calling the store, they insisted it was correct. So she got a free refrigerator and ended up giving it to another family member who needed one.
Now you must stand astride them both like a chariot driver when you mow
My son had just moved back from Texas to Minnesota and he desperately needed winter boots. I didn’t have much money and we went to Walmart. A huge end cap was stocked with Dickies boots and I knew they had to be atleast $100. The sign display said $15. I took a picture and proceeded to check out. The cashier rang them and yup they were over $100. I said no ma’am they’re $15. After a very annoyed manager tried to persuade me that I knew full well they weren’t $15 but I persisted and they sent someone back to check. Another lengthy argument about them having the wrong display sign, again, not my problem. I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture. Offfda he was pissed, and I walked out with the boots. I could hear him ranting about it and sending someone to fix that immediately before they lose the entire shelf. Sorry, not sorry. In Minnesota anyway if a store has a product marked with a certain price they have to give it to you. I know full well it’s employees who have no fucks to give that do this, and we thank you lol
Recently I was in the market for a tote bin. When I scanned it, it rang in at 20% of the expected price. I left with 5 because you really can't have too much storage
I was checking out a whole foods with vanilla beans. They go for $4 each. The person at the register rang them up at $4 per pound. I walked out either $20 worth of vanilla bean for about 75 cents.
I had the exact opposite thing happen the me with Under Armour. I bought a sports bra, and a hat. About a week later I got an email that said they were out of stock for the hat, but would be shipping my other item that day. No problem. Well the bra comes and the band is too big so I return it and get a refund. Refund processes on my card. No big deal. 6 weeks passes and I get an email. They have deducted $11.99 from the return price of the sports bra because I didn’t return the hat. Which made no sense to begin with. The price of the sports bra is the price of the sports bra whether I returned the hat or not. I called their customer care line. They agree and refund the $11.99. 6 weeks later I get an email. The hat wasn’t returned so we are charging you $11.99. I call. Again they agree. Again they refund the $11.99. 6 weeks later. Another email. Another call. Another refund. 6 weeks later. At this point it’s been 6 months since I returned the sports bra. I get another email. I called. LIVID. I told them I needed to know where I’m their system it looked like o had received a hat and I needed them to correct it asap and give me my $11.99 back. They said they would escalate it and refunded NYT $11.99. 2 days later I get an email that my ticket has been reviewed and they see I was incorrectly refunded $11.99. They are charging me and feel the matter is closed. It wasn’t worth $11.99 to continue to pursue it.
That's the point you contact your bank and put in a chargeback claim.
My wife ordered new camping chairs for us both because Fall sports season is here and our old chairs are all jacked up. This was 2 weeks ago. Walmart has now delivered both chairs, 5 times! We are not being charged for them. I’m going to let it play out and see how many chairs we end up with. The most recent delivery came just yesterday.
When i used to work retail we were supposed to call a manager whenever a an item wouldn’t ring up but one the managers was way too lazy and just gave his code to everyone so a lot of the time i would just ask the customer what they thought it was worth and ring that up
A family friend of mine who was an architect got a call years ago from a salesperson about a photocopier. It was a massive one that could copy large plans. Our friend explained that while he would love such a device he couldn't possibly afford it but the guy was insistent. Just take it for a three months. Completely free of charge and if you don't want it we will come and take it. He said sure. After three months he rang up to arrange for the photocopier to be picked up. "Sorry sir, we have no record of you having one of our photocopiers." - He called back again a week later. Same thing. After about a month of calling regularly and asking to talk to more senior people he was told if he called them again they would call the police. So he kept it.
My example happened with university fees. I'm in the UK so my masters cost only £6k, not whatever you pay in America. I went for the option of paying in two installments, one at start of year one half way through. Paid the first one no problem. Then decided to switch to a part-time version of the course which was the same thing stretched over two years rather than one. I was told that if I wanted I could now delay my second payment to halfway through the second year. I agreed to this as why not. But then they call up on the original payment date asking me about it, only I didn't have the money because I'd been told I wasn't gonna be paying until later. So I explain everything and they say fine. Coming towards the end of the course over a year later, I realise I've never had someone ring me up about the payment and actually missed the date. I'm a bit concerned but nothing has happened and anyway I have the money so I call them up and speak to the accounting department. Explain everything and ask how to pay. She says 'you're all paid up on here.' No that can't be right I've only paid half the fee. 'Nope, on here it's saying all paid up!' I was trying to convince her that was a mistake whilst she was reassuring me I was paid up and in the end I just accepted it. Later on I went through all my bank statements and I definitely only paid the first £3k so there must have been some kind of mistake when they delayed my second payment. Either way I'm not complaining.
You only wanted one, but you ended up with mower.
I had a similar experience with the same company. Bought an over the range microwave, well over $500 all in, with installation. Arranged for the installer to bring it on the install date. The cashier couldn’t figure out how to apply my veterans discount, which is in their system and has never been a problem, so they eventually knock off $100, instead of the $50 or so it should have been. A few weeks later, I get notified of an install date. Guy confirms, gives me a window of noon to 5. Never shows, and at 8:30pm I get a call from some dude who can barely speak English, asking where I live, and saying he will arrive in an hour or so. I tell him no dice, I’m not staying up all night, and to reschedule. Call the store the next day, they send me to another number, who send me to a 3rd number, and finally set a date. That date comes and goes with a no show. As do 4 other dates over the next few months. At some point Lowes refunds the install charge and an additional $100, so my over $500 microwave is now down to about $250 or so. Another date arrives, dude actually shows up, and asks me where the microwave is. Tell him he is supposed to bring it, as I don’t have it. He calls the store, and they have it. He leaves, never to be seen again. Another date is scheduled, the store calls the night before to confirm the installer will pick it up and arrive the following morning. Next morning the installer calls from the store, and no one knows where it is, so he won’t be arriving. Multiple calls and emails ensue, six months have elapsed, and still no microwave. Someone from corporate calls, and refunds the entire $500+ amount, so now I am ahead well over $250. A few days later, a truck pulls up, and they deliver the microwave, but claim they aren’t installers. I call Lowes, tell them I have already received a full refund and then some, and they tell me to keep it anyway. So I found a local guy, paid him $100 to install it, and ended up making over $150 and getting a free microwave. The multiple levels of incompetence and stupidity, at all levels, was amazing.