Now THAT'S Great Info !

You find them everywhere – at strip malls, in parking lots, grocery and video stores, the corner newsstand -  people who cheat other people on a daily basis without so much as a second thought.  Nice enough folks; people who smile at other people, maybe even open a car door for an old lady.  But cheats nonetheless.

There I was, standing in line with my A & W rootbeer in-hand.  I don’t usually buy pop but it was on sale for just $.99 at the corner convenience store where I usually get my cappachino every morning.  I smiled up at Earl, the clerk that was always so friendly, courteous and helpful, as I plunked down my dollar bill.  “One dollar” he said, smiling back at me.  Into the register went my dollar bill.

For a split second I did one of those infernal inner debates we gals tend to have with ourselves on occaisions such as this one.  No, I’ll not say it; I decided against correcting him and went out the door to my car.  As I buckled my seatbelt, it hit me; I’d allowed him to cheat me.  The  little devil on my left shoulder argued with a “It’s only $.99.”

The horned dude in red sitting smugly there was correct, but right and wrong were what you gott from eating the “other tree” in the Garden of Eden … the Tree of the Knowledge of Good AND Evil.  So while he insinuated the insidious fact into my left ear, the other invisible guy  – the one tsitting  on my right shoulder (we’ll dress him in white – how novel) whispered “That’s right;  but how many times a day on how many items a day, EVERY DAY of the year, does this happen?” 

It occurred to me that the possibility of monetary gain that little corner store made on just that small, one cent cheat could be a very big deal.  Think about it. That soft drink was only one of many items in that store priced at just 99 cents.

I’m conservative, so I quickly figured it up:  three, 99 cent items sold in an hour = $.03/hour stolen change (I know it’s got to be lots more than that in a busy store like this one) … the store opens at 6:30 am and closes at 10 pm (that’s 15.5 hours/day) = about $.47/day, and this place is open all 365 days/year, which comes to about $169.72/year STOLEN FROM THE COMMUNITY that patronizes this place!  If they’d done it all in one day, it would make the 6 o’clock news!

You can do the math from here on in; take all the convenience stores in just your neck of the woods PLUS the grocery stores (some of which are open 24/7/365).  It’s a lot, trust me.

Just by counting up the stores right around where I live, say in a 2-mile radius (just off the top of my head it was a dozen or more…but I used 12 as my figure for this example), if this were just all that was finaggled from the unsuspecting, albeit allowing public, the theft amount would surpass $2036.70 a year!

You could get a little fanatical about it I suppose and then think about all the $1.99 items that the very same little sneaky trick is done with, but that boggles the mind and scrambles the little brains most of have left at the end of a busy day.
A measly 99 cents isn’t so measly when it comes to something like this …
so don’t you let it happen, again (I’m just sayin’).