So I’ve been getting loads and loads of comment spam on my blog, and I go through the moderation queue quickly, designating whole pages of comments as spam at a time, and I just accidentally wiped out a whole page of legitimate, pre-approved comments. So that sucks. I can’t find a way to get them back. (Sparky?) If you’ve commented on my blog recently and your comment got deleted, I apologize. And if you comment on this blog in the future and your comment gets marked as spam, it’s because of my mis-click. Whoops.
I like y’all, I promise! I don’t really think you’re spamming me! But the bots inspire rage…
Alissa
Several days ago I was at the grocery store, in the auto-teller area, checking out with my purchase. I’d bought some tomatoes to make a baked-veggies dish with, and in the produce section I had been seduced by the appealing lumpiness and inconsistent color of the heirloom tomatoes, and bought them instead of the Romas I was aiming for. The recipe calls for a lot of tomatoes and I couldn’t remember exactly how much, so I grabbed generously, and ended up with about twelve dollars of tomatoes on my hands in the checkout line. In my current budget-strapped state, that’s something I notice.
But it wasn’t quite enough to send me back for the cheaper tomatoes. As I hit the button on the self-checkout monitor for the PLU code entry screen, the thought crossed my mind: the machine doesn’t know the difference. It would be so easy to punch in the PLU code for the Romas, half as expensive by weight, and walk out with my discounted purchase. If caught, I could plead absent-mindedness, confusing one tomato for another–easily, one could make such an honest mistake.
I’ve never shoplifted in my life, not even as a kid when friends were daring me to, despite priding myself on taking every dare. I always prided myself, too, on doing the right thing, living by the notion that what makes this life good is that we’re all basically honest people, and encouraging that in small ways is important. I think it was my dad who, when I asked as a child why stores didn’t have more stringent security measures, told me about a concept called the “public trust,” and I took it to heart.
But I’ve also never found myself in a position where cheating the store a little would be so easy to do and so consequence-free. I actually considered it long enough to find the Roma PLU code on the little plastic sheet taped to the monitor.
I didn’t pull the trigger. I walked out of the store twelve dollars poorer for my tomatoes. And, really, the Romas would have tasted better in the recipe anyway; and I had bought about twice as much as I needed. So that was my bad call there. But it makes me think. I’m sure some people do that–enter a cheaper code. If I were having a worse day, I might have done so myself. And, clearly, the store is aware of that missing revenue. Just as clearly, the expense of employing three or four more people outweighs the expense of the extra missing produce, or they wouldn’t use the machines.
Today I threw out the other half of those tomatoes, not having had the chance to use them before they got moldy.
(sigh)
Alissa