Beefgate 2009

We got up bright and early this morning to get in on Hy-Vee's six hour sale. Now I could have took Jon to work then went by myself, but what fun would that have been? Besides, I wanted to get four rolls of their .99 ground beef special, but there was a limit of 2 per customer (or so we thought), so I figured I'd save an extra trip and get Jon to go through the line separately.

We're in line and Jon decides to go through with his beef first. I heard the cashier ask him if they were his and he said "yes," but then I heard the old lady in front of Jon say they were hers. According to Jon, he said they were his like three times, but the cashier rang them out for the old lady instead, then told Jon to go back and get two more.

There are a couple things wrong with this scenario. First of all, I have a feeling the lady knew they weren't hers but thought she'd be really slick and get two more than the limit, so she claimed them as her own. I could be wrong, and it could have been an honest mistake, but do you ever just get that feeling? I had it. The second thing wrong was that the cashier told Jon to go back and get his own meat. That's kind of a big no as far as customer service goes. She should have called a bag boy or a manager and asked them to go get Jon the two rolls that were swiped from him. To be fair, she apologized to me about 20 times, and I said it was fine, but Jon was not amused, and after he checked out in another line, he gave that poor cashier such a mean look!

The whole thing wasn't that big of an issue. I was probably mellow about it because Jon was pissed off and I didn't want him hurting anyone (he rarely gets mad about things to tell the truth), but I see his point. It was bad service to tell a customer to go get something they'd actually already picked up. In hindsight, it was an amusing way to start a Saturday.