lowquality.net

So today, at lunch, I go for a walk around Town Cen­ter, to Barnes & Noble and then across Vir­ginia Beach Blvd. to Kohl’s and walk through the store and into the mall. Some­where inside of the hobby shop that has a Lego sign but no actual Lego prod­ucts, it hits me that I can eat a lit­tle dark choco­late dur­ing Phase 1 of south beach so I head for Sweet Tooth at Pem­broke mall to get a cou­ple of those Ghi­radelli squares (which are per­fect because they aren’t too much candy but still hit the spot).

When I get there, the lady behind the counter is chat­ting away on her cell with some­one about co-pays and doctor’s offices. Basi­cally sound­ing like a know-it-all. I walk past her towards the pre-wrapped candy bars like a man on a mis­sion and, about a minute later, I guess, it occurs to her that I might need some help and she yells (really, YELLS) “CAN I HELP YOU!?!” in her nasally, obnox­ious Long Island-ish, Mup­pet voice and I say, almost under my breath, “no, I’m ok.”

I locate the 60% cocoa Ghi­radelli squares and snatch up three of them. I go up to the counter and she puts her call on hold and says “How many? Three?” and I nod.

She rings them up at $1.51 and I whip out my bank card.

“Are you kid­ding me?” she says.

Even though it was obvi­ous that she was a pain in the ass before I hit the counter, her com­plete rude­ness caught me off guard. “I don’t have any cash,” I say.

“You should always carry some cash,” she scolds. “at least five dollars.”

“Never. I lose it too eas­ily. I don’t even have a bill­fold.” I hold up my open wal­let and make the big-eyed you so stoopid face at her.

“Really?” she paused and made the kind of con­de­scend­ing exha­la­tion that means the same as rolling your eyes with­out the stigma of get­ting imme­di­ately punched in the face by a husky nerd on a diet.

I was seri­ously about to let her get the last word until she did that.

“This is the year 2009, you know,” I said. Kind of pick­ing a fight.

“Well some busi­nesses won’t accept credit cards for only 1.50.”

I scanned the cash reg­is­ter for a min­i­mum card pur­chase sign. I saw no such sign. “I don’t go to those busi­nesses,” I said.

“Well have a nice day.”

“Enjoy your phone call.”

The truth is that I DO some­times go to cash-only places. Kin’s Wok on 21st street is one of my favorite Chi­nese restau­rants and I will make a trip to the ATM to go there. If I hap­pen to have some extra sin­gles and no cof­fee beans in the house, I will hit up Elliott’s for cof­fee on Col­ley Ave (they accept credit cards but have a $20 min­i­mum which is El Retardo, in my book). I under­stand why over-privileged small busi­ness own­ers think its such a has­sle to accept credit trans­ac­tions for such small amounts, its because they don’t feel they should pay a fee for $1.51. What they don’t under­stand (or care about) is that as soon as I take a $20 bill out of an ATM, it’s gone. Instead of going to a cof­fee shop and pay­ing a cou­ple of bucks for an Amer­i­cano with my bank card, I’ve taken out 20 bucks I can no longer account for. It’s spent. Maybe I should be bet­ter at man­ag­ing my cash, but I’m the cus­tomer, so fuck you and gimme my damn candy.

She was obvi­ously the (or one of) the own­ers, no retail employee would give a cus­tomer that much shit about a credit card trans­ac­tion, they would just do it. I can’t decide if I should reward her dis­ser­vice by avoid­ing her shop and pay­ing a lit­tle extra at the very fancy Royal Choco­late in Town Cen­ter or if I should KEEP going there every week so she keeps get­ting charged a fee every time she swipes my card. I should add that I was the only cus­tomer in the store. At 12:30PM on a week­day, and she’s giv­ing me shit about using my credit card.