Yup, I'm one of the hordes of December babies, or I was quite a few years ago. Starting now, we have a 14 day count down to my birthday, on the 14th. Heh.

I only have a handful of people who wanted to exchange cards for the holidays, but if anyone else does wish to (and only didn't respond last time because it was such a pain to Note anyone)... Note me! It's not too late to get your own holiday card from me this year.


I'm a cashier at a Major Chain. Sometimes I see some really crazy/silly/down right stupid things. Yesterday's topper was this: family comes through self-check. Mom, dad, two pre-teen girls. Just happened to be watching the woman as she didn't ring up the first item, rang in the second, put both in a bag and put that into her basket. I wandered over and politely mentioned that only one of those two items rang in. She quickly fixes it while telling me she's not a thief, and it's the fault of all the beeps going off. I nod, as if I find this perfectly reasonable, in spite of the HUNDREDS of other customers who use self check every day who do not have a problem managing to ring in everything. Walk away to my monitoring station again.

But I'm watching them put more stuff into their basket in knotted bags then they are ringing up. The father and older girl start playing right where it conveniently blocks my view of the mom. They get another red light at their station, and I wander over to "check it out" rather than just fixing it at my station. They now have about 5-6 bags packed full and knotted shut. When I walked away from my station, I noted that they'd only rung up 7 items. The bags had little stuff in them. Yeah, I can count. I tell the dad that the contents of the bags is more than 7 items, and he questions what I mean by that. "My station counts the number of items that you're ringing up, and this is a lot more than that." He doesn't really answer that, but I didn't really state it as a question. The mom comments that the station is running in Spanish, and can I fix that for them? She just can't understand what it says when anything comes up. Mind, I can't read it either, but the responses are very limited, so if you've been through a few times, you don't need to be able to read it, you'll know. I tell her I can't do that in the middle of a transaction. They just keep ringing things up like they aren't doing anything wrong... like we don't have any reason to stop them or call them on anything.

By now the LP guy is at my monitoring station with the supervisor, and I wander over to comment on how boldly they aren't ringing everything up after standing right next to the mom for some minutes "helping" her ring everything in. Catching her whenever she misses something. She tells me it's now Kyle's job to deal with them, and I ask who he is and look right at the fellow who's standing there watching this family. I'm told he's Kyle, and gladly turn it over to him.

They pay up and take their stuff to the bathrooms. The baskets stay outside, I'm not sure what the mom was doing, but the dad and daughters (the mom said she had 4, but only 2 were with them) are waiting with the baskets. I walk away to the next station I've been sent to.

Later I find out that they've had a nice little talk with our LP, management AND the cops, will be spending at least a night or two in jail... and have lost their kids over this. Christmas is not even a month away, and they've just given their kids one of the worst presents ever.

These people were "warned" twice at the register that I was onto them, and that was without knowing they'd been acting suspicious enough to draw LP's attention before getting there. When I called them on the contents of the sealed bags, they made NO effort to prove they'd rung up the contents. I know that the way to get away with this stuff is to act like you're doing nothing wrong... but when called on it, it's a really good idea to STOP DOING IT!

Yes, this is really bothering me. I hate that the kids have now lost their parents, and that their family holidays will be tainted by this. Yes, the parents brought this down on all of them, but it still really sucks for the kids.