A Wal-Mart story.

So now that we have a couch with legs after Target (I can only assume) abandoned their refunded but incomplete couch in our apartment for us to deal with--the couch eventually came to find legs through ingenuity (you have no idea) and Home Depot--now, I have a Wal-Mart story.

I'm interested in people's thoughts on this because it is something we blamed on ourselves that quickly flipped after talking to our local store's customer service.

What happened is, Monday night after work we were in Wal-Mart looking around the electronics department. They were stocking the shelves with Tuesday's new release DVDs and Elise grabbed a copy of Pan's Labyrinth. It didn't have a shelf tag yet, but the guy tells Elise that he thinks it's $22. I'm all for buying it, but want to wait until the next day to watch it.

We grab some sugar-free ice cream, check out and head home.

The next night, we go to watch the movie and we don't even have it. Now, this is the stupid part. This is where we are to blame. I put the ice cream in the freezer when we got home from Wal-Mart, but thought Elise had grabbed the movie out of the bag when I set it on the counter. She thought I had taken the movie out when I was putting away the ice cream. Neither of us had actually touched or even seen the movie outside of the checkout line.

Now, it isn't even the same day anymore. If this were, say, a $4 grocery item, oh well. If this were a $15 DVD, I'd probably just go back to Wal-Mart and buy a new copy, but when I found the receipt, I saw that the movie rang up $27.87. Holy shit! I don't remember the last time I spent that much on a movie. I mean, it's not 1998 anymore in DVD land. Now I feel really stupid. This was a $30 DVD that had just become $60 if I want to go and repurchase it.

But we decide to give customer service a shot first. I mean, a store as big as Wal-Mart must keep some kind of log of the groceries and items that people leave at the checkout counter at what time. People leave entire bags of things all the time, right? If they have a log, it'll be in there and they'll know we're telling the truth and we'll save ourselves $30. If they have a log and it isn't in there, at least we tried.

So, the guy at customer service just says, "Let me get my manager. They'll have to pull up the security footage." Okay, so so much for a log.

The manager comes over and grabs our receipt, he looks it over for a second, then he looks me right in the face and says, "You only purchased three items and didn't even check for the most expensive one?"

Now, I wanted to walk the fuck out after that. I didn't walk up into their store demanding things or acting in any other way than that we'd made a mistake. What I'm saying is, we knew it was stupid, we didn't need this guy all but calling us stupid, first thing.

He made us stand around and wait while he got in contact with security and I really wanted to tell this guy off and leave, but of course, he's talking about checking security tapes to make sure we're not ripping him off and leaving would just make us look guilty. Eventually he says that there isn't anyone in security, so we should call back in the morning. (Note to REAL theives, Super Wal-Marts don't have security guys at 8pm?)

The next morning, Elise makes the follow-up call to Wal-Mart, as they had asked. They ask for our phone number and say that they'll check the tape and get back to us later in the day.

Nowhere in any of this did they take down the information on the receipt. The time, or date or register of the purchase. Yet they say they're checking the tape for us.

After that call, I wrote to corporate over the handling of the situation. From what I could tell, it was handled in a way to either intimidate us into leaving (if we were lying) or get frustrated and give up (if we weren't). Honestly though, I think the truth is just that these people were just pushing us to the next person's shift, rather than actually doing what they insisted on doing in the first place.

I wish I'd just blown that second $30 to begin with, because now I'm just going to have to make a project of this.