Finding innovative ways to save money is more important than ever in these trying times. Hassling cashiers is never the answer, yet, these workers have some mind-boggling tales of extremely frugal customers and the great lengths they’ve gone to in order to save an extra buck.
All stories have been edited for clarity.
Your Fault My Triumph
“When I worked at Staples, it was about fifteen minutes before closing time when a lady who looked to be in her sixties walked in and made a bee-line for our iPad case display.
She spent about ten minutes looking through them and picked out one of our premium leather cases that cost sixty bucks. She came up to my register to check out. The old woman seemed to have a slight irritating smirk on her face as she approached, and when I rang her up, she looked at the total due and nonchalantly shook her head and said, ‘No.’
Confused, I looked at her and said, ‘No? …No what?’
Without missing a beat, she then said, ‘That’s not the price I’m paying. The price tag on the display said five dollars.” I knew very well that even if the case was on sale, which it wasn’t, it would have cost quite a bit more than that.
I asked her to wait for a second while I went to check the case display and saw that she was looking at the price tag for the iPad skins that we sold. I walked back and explained the misunderstanding and asked if she’d like me to put the case back for her.
This is when things got complicated.
‘No I still want the case, but I’m only paying five dollars for it,’ the old woman says defiantly.
I looked at her slightly dumbfounded, and politely said, ‘I’m sorry but I won’t be able to sell you this case for that price.’
‘You don’t have a choice; for one, the customer is always right, and for two, your display was messed up, which is your fault,’ she argued.
My customer service persona had left the building at that point, so I responded, ‘Well, the case may have been in the wrong spot but there’s no way you’re leaving here with a five-dollar leather case.’
The old woman became visibly upset before she arrogantly barks, ‘Bring me your manager.’
I called over my manager who was well known for having zero tolerance for people who came in at the last minute before closing. By the time she came back, it was five minutes past closing. I briefly explained the situation.
‘Ma’am,’ my manager said, not even hiding her annoyance, ‘that case was in the wrong spot, and I’m sure you saw that all the others just like it were in the area marked sixty dollars but you chose to try and take advantage of my cashier. You can purchase this case for sixty dollars, or you can leave right now.’
The old woman made some comments about calling corporate and walked out without the case.”
I’m Sure We Ordered This
“I once worked at a Chick-Fil-A and we served mostly college students, but occasionally parents would come in while visiting their kids at college, or if they were touring the college with their soon-to-be college student.
We didn’t have any problems with the students usually, aside from things like ‘forgetting’ to ask that they wanted a drink until after the payment had gone through.
However, it was the parents who we worried about. The parents would do things they often seemed to think they would just get away with.
One family stuck out in particular.
I had rung them up. It was a mom and dad with their two young daughters. Each person got a meal except for the mom who insisted she only wanted a cool wrap with a cup of water. I made sure to double-check the tab on this one because without the fries it wouldn’t ring up as being a meal combo.
About ten minutes later, the two young girls showed up at the corner of the counter, during a bit of a rush, and said that they were supposed to get a large fry and an eight-count nugget when they most certainly were not.
It didn’t take long to realize just how desperate their parents were in saving a couple of bucks.
We made sure everything was in their bag, and when ringing them up I double-checked everything and read them back the order with no problems.
When I asked for their receipt, things got even sketchier.
They didn’t have it.
We pulled their order back up on the screen and the girl who was sending out orders was more than positive that she had put all the food into the bags. It was obvious the girls were a little nervous. We all knew they didn’t order the food they claimed was missing. Given that we were busy and really didn’t have the time or the patience, we gave them their food, but everyone behind that counter knew they didn’t actually order the food and the parents were just using their kids to get food for free that they also knew they didn’t order.”
Busted!
“I was never a cashier but I worked in Loss Prevention. One time I was watching this woman because she kept looking at the cameras. When she was sure she wasn’t being watched, she went into a corner and worked a loose thread on a blouse. She then cut it off to make it look like there was a small hole.
Once she finished her work, she casually walked to the front register where she then demanded the item to be marked down to half the price!
She argued with every manager including the store manager. Finally, a manager consulted with me, so I told him to follow my lead. It was time to put an end to her shenanigans once and for all.
I was planning on apprehending her for damaging merchandise and I had it all on video.
So, because she was such a pain in the neck, I told them to give her the discount. When she turned away from the register, she had the biggest smile on her face. Until I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m with Loss Prevention. you need to come with me.’
The woman immediately began to rant and rave until she walked into the office and saw all the cameras, especially the ones pointed at the register. The woman began pleading with me and shared some sob story about how poor she was. I had a witness I worked with go through her purse to make sure she had no weapons but ended up uncovering something that forced us to call the cops.
The witness found over a thousand dollars in cash.
It gets worse.
She became indignant and refused to cooperate. The woman ultimately left me no choice but to call the police. When they left with her, I decided to follow them with the camera. When they were outside, she took them to her car, which was a seven-series BMW! The woman was more well off than she had been letting on.
I don’t know what the officer was saying, but I could clearly see him yelling at her with a finger in her face! The woman was bawling at that point. I felt a lot of satisfaction with her arrest.”
The Value Of A Penny
“I used to work in an office supplies store many moons ago. One time I had a customer come in looking for a bottle of Wite-Out. We had it on sale for sixty-nine cents per bottle. The woman said the drugstore down the street had it for sixty-eight cents per bottle, then asked if we could sell ours for the same price to her. The boss heard the conversation and said that she could only purchase the Wite-Out for our sale price of sixty-nine cents. The woman became agitated and left the store without the item.
Fifteen minutes later, she returned with a huge grin on her face. What she did next made me tense up from secondhand embarrassment.
She held up the bottle of Wite-Out she’d purchased down the street and with her receipt in her other hand, showed off that we lost the sale and she saved a whole penny!
The store manager and the boss both started laughing. She asked what they were laughing about. They quickly realized how serious she was, but their comeback still makes me chuckle after all these years.
They said, ‘lady, you spent more in gas running around town than you saved to buy the Wite-Out elsewhere, then you spent even MORE money to come back here to rub it in our faces, not to mention the amount of time you spent doing this.’
She continued to hold her bottle of Wite-Out up in the air and left the store telling everybody she passed on the way out how she saved a PENNY by going down the street to the convenience store!
We all just shook our heads.
On a more positive note, the boss gave all the employees the ability to match prices if that situation came up again.”
Where’s My Discount?
“This all took place at a Home Depot.
The customer entered the store looking for 8-foot 2x4s. We sold tons of 8-foot 2x4s. I sold a lot of fully wrapped bunks of them. I also had the best price in town for this board.
Home Depot didn’t offer discounts to most people, or at least they didn’t when I worked there. I would imagine that if you ordered an entire truck full of lumber and had it shipped directly from the Distribution Center to your job site, you’d get a small price break but if you walked into the store and bought them at the register you were paying two twenty-five per board no matter how many you got. But like I said, I was lower than anyone in town on these. Home Depot’s computer system lists both the sale price and the price we paid and our profit was only three cents per board.
The customer came in demanding a discount. ‘I’m sorry sir, but we don’t offer discounts. This is the lowest price in town.’ The customer then said he never bought lumber without getting a discount, so he paid for the rest of his order and left.
A few days later he came back bragging about how he’d found someone to give him a discount so he bought them there. I asked what he wound up paying, and it was more than I would have charged him.
So in other words, he paid more after getting a discount than he would have paid at Home Depot without one.
Sounds like smart buying to me.”
You Can’t Be Serious
“In the early 1990s, I used to do computer builds and repairs at a local recycling center. We’d get pallets of old computers, monitors, keyboards, computer mice, and tons of random computer peripherals. After fixing, repairing, refurbishing, and cleaning them up, we’d stack them in various sections of the warehouse for prospective customers to choose from.
Computers that normally sold for eight hundred to one thousand bucks new, were for sale, used, for about sixty percent off with a thirty-day warranty.
A woman came in to buy a computer for her teenage son but didn’t have enough money for the entire setup. I told her we’d be glad to set her choice of monitor aside for a couple of days and she could come back with the rest of the money to claim it. No money down.
She scanned the stacks and stacks of monitors from floor to ceiling of almost a hundred refurbished units of various makes, models, and sizes and says, ‘Humph! You have so many of these worthless, used pieces of garbage monitors, you should just give them away!’
I blinked at her and said it took a good three to five hours of work getting each unit disassembled, put in decent working order, tested, certified, cleaned, and packaged. There was no way we could justify just giving them away.
‘The best I can do is ask my manager if he can give you a price break,’ I offered.
What she said next made me realize just how low she was willing to go to get out of paying a few extra bucks.
She had the nerve to say, ‘Turn your back and let me walk out with a monitor, and it’ll be our secret.’
Dumbfounded, I said, ‘If I turn my back and let you steal our property, two things will happen. I’ll get fired and you’ll be in jail. How do you think your child will feel about his mother being a thief?’
Some people!”
Penny Pinching Burger Queen
“Back when I was twenty-three, I got a job working fast food at Burger King. I was originally a delivery driver but got moved to cashier when business wasn’t doing so well.
I had this older lady and her young grandchild come in. The lady asked for a small order of fries. I always repeat the order back to the customer to make sure it’s correct. After ringing her up, I proceeded to give her the fries but out of nowhere she started yelling at me and asking why I overcharged her.
I calmly told her the small fries were one dollar and nineteen cents with tax. She wouldn’t stop yelling that she was overcharged. So, I show her the prices but she snapped at me and said, ‘That’s not what I asked for, I asked for a value fry.’ At that point, she had been making a scene and asked for my manager.
Once he got there, the lady then proceeded to tell him that I made a mistake and she wanted to be refunded or else. My manager asked her what exactly she was trying to order only to have her yell, ‘I told the girl I wanted a SMALL VALUE FRY!’
Mind you, a small and value fry are different. Regardless my manager refunded her.
The price difference?
A whole eleven cents.”
Give Me What I Ordered!
“Back when I was working at Mcdonald’s the was this regular that would come in to order a Quarter pounder. After he paid and got his meal, like clockwork, he would get mad, scream and curse that he ordered a Double Quarter Pounder, and would cause a ruckus until he got his extra meat.
He did this once or twice a week, every week. He did it to me and it left me pretty shaken up and in tears the first time because I thought I did something wrong. When he did it to me a second time I was just filled with rage, at him and my managers for knowing this man was a repeat offender and not warning me the first time.
When he came in a third time, I made a manager stand next to me while I took his order. When he tried it again I looked at my manager and said, ‘He said Quarter pounder didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ my manager said begrudgingly.
The man got loud and I countered by saying, ‘You have two people who heard you say Quarter Pounder so you can either take it or leave it and I’m not giving you a refund.’
He was furious and never tried it when I was working register again.”
The Smoothie Lawsuit
“I used to work for a gas station.
The most unreasonable complaint had to be the one time a guy came in and bought a smoothie. He opened the cap, took a sip, closed it poorly, and started to shake it while squeezing hard on the plastic bottle. He ended up messing up his clothes because of how hard he was shaking the slightly opened container, then had the audacity to demand that we pay for the steam cleaning.
Somehow he got what he wanted, but he wasn’t done yet.
He then wanted to sue us because he said the stain couldn’t be removed. He claimed that it was actually an employee who had taken the cap off. His wish to go to trial was granted because the store refused to reimburse him for his ‘super-expensive suit.’
In court, he told the judge he was a regular customer that always got mocked by our staff. We were a small place and knew all our regulars.
We did not know him from a hole in the wall.
His story grew even more ridiculous
The judge asked him if what he said was true, why would he go back so often. The guy had no answer to that, so he doubled down on the ‘but the cashier opened the bottle’ narrative.
We then showed the camera footage from two angles, showing the cashier never touched the cap and that the guy himself twisted it open and then twisted it back.
So the judge inquired if he asked for cleaning. He said he did but the suit was ruined and could not be restored. To add more to his narrative, he claimed in court that couldn’t produce the ruined suit because supposedly burned it and had to replace it.
In the end, the guy lost, and the gas station company counter-sued him for trying to defraud the company and he lost that lawsuit too.
To add fuel to the fire, he tried to steal gas, by pumping and driving off without paying. We got his plates from the video footage, and then slapped a restraining order on him that he could not pump gas at the store. He violated that by complaining he had to pump at our specific store.
When he broke the order we called the cops on him. He got arrested and tried to get the order taken down, which did not work thanks to him driving off without paying.”
The Old Switcharoo
“I worked at Kohl’s for several years and we had this one lady that would come in at least once a week and take a whole bunch of items into the fitting room. We didn’t have attendants to keep track of how many items a customer took into the fitting room and she would be in there forever!
Forever because she was switching outfits and jewelry around on the little cardboard cards to ‘adjust’ the price.
Now, anyone that works retail knows their brands and can tell the cheap ones from the good ones. So I knew what a pair of Candie’s earrings looked like compared to a pair of Vera Wang or one of the other ‘higher end’ brands of costume/fashion jewelry, not to mention that a lot of the products were marked.
The lady would always switch out clearance pieces and non-clearance pieces trying to get better deals. Just because it was clearance didn’t always mean it was going to be cheaper than something else, especially when something is on sale.
Well, that same day, she came to the register, and at the time, the policy stated that if you noticed an item or two that wasn’t right, you had to let it slide. You were discouraged from raising a fuss unless it was concerning a large amount, but when someone presented you with fifty pieces of jewelry that were ALL on the wrong cards, then loss prevention got involved.
We spent hours combing the jewelry department to straighten out her mess and by the time we presented the police with our report, the woman in her ‘madness’ of trying to get the best deals would have spent more money, almost fifty dollars more to be exact, with her ‘system’ than if she would have just bought the pieces she wanted at the sale prices.”
Nice Try!
“There was once this guy who came into the grocery store I worked at every single morning between seven and seven thirty in the morning.
Every day, he would grab a shopping cart, and read from a small list in his hand. The list always had the same items on it, including a head of iceberg lettuce, tomato, potato, newspaper, and a gallon of water. Occasionally his list would include things like ‘dessert,’ or ‘hamburgers.’
Every single day he bought a single plum tomato.
During the summers, our store would purchase local produce from local farmers, including tomatoes, raspberries, blueberries, squash, and so on.
These local tomatoes were usually massive and shaped more like a traditional tomato, and nothing like a plum tomato.
This guy came through my co-worker’s line to check out. She was fully aware of the difference between the two tomatoes.
He replaced the produced tag from the plum tomato, which was less expensive at one dollar and twenty-nine cents a pound, and placed it onto the local tomatoes we sold, which were much more expensive at five bucks a pound.
My co-worker rang it up under ‘local tomato,’ and this is where things go south.
‘That’s a plum tomato,’ he said urgently.
‘No sir, this is a New Hampshire tomato.’ My co-worker informed him.
‘It has a tag on it for a plum tomato,’ the customer argued.
At that point, my manager could be seen poking her eyes from her office door. It wasn’t even eight in the morning, and there normally wasn’t much action in the store that early.
‘Hey, Lydia,’ my co-worker says.
Lydia opened the door and made her way over to the cash register. She asked them what was going on.
The man continued to argue that my co-worker was trying to overcharge him for a tomato when in reality, she was charging him the correct price for the tomato.
He huffed and puffed and walked back to the produce section to find a plum tomato, and bought that instead of the local tomato.
There was no doubt in my mind that he switched the tags.
Plum tomatoes come into our store with produce tags already on them. Our produce department workers put tags onto the local tomatoes as we get them in by the box.
The pettiest thing a customer has done? Try to buy a five-dollar tomato for one dollar and twenty-nine cents by switching the stickers, and then putting up a fuss when we called him out on what he did.”
Full Circle
“Before food stamps were put on a prepaid card, they were actually printed on a strip of paper and came in different denominations. If an order totaled up to five dollars and seventy-six cents, and they gave you one dollar and a five-dollar food stamp, you would give them the cents back in actual cash. If they had change coming back for more than odd cents, you would then give them the change in food stamps. In other words, there were no food stamps for under one dollar.
There were also certain items you could buy using the stamps.
Cancer sticks, adult beverages, nonedible items, and pet food were a few you couldn’t purchase. Taxable items were not allowed. Food was not taxable in Iowa unless it was prepared in a restaurant. Candy and sodas were taxable, but candy under ten cents was not.
A mother came into the store almost every day. She normally had all of her kids with her. The kids each got a three-cent sucker and one at a time paid with a one-dollar food stamp. Each kid got ninety-seven cents back as change and gave it to their mom. She would then use the money to buy a pack of smokes.
I don’t know that this would be called cheap, but it was demeaning for the kids.”
