Curtains
It was the winter of 2002, not too long after Christmas. Michael and I just wanted to get some curtains to put up in the computer room so we wouldn't have so much glare on our monitors. Sears was the logical place for us to go because it was close and the products we bought there in the past seemed to be nice enough, and we figured they'd have a pretty standard collection of curtains to meet our needs. Besides, we needed vacuum bags.
It was evening, about 6 pm, when we showed up at the Sears store. Quickly we located the curtain section and started looking around, holding curtains up to the flourecent lighting to see how much light would get through, passing by the ones that looked to flowery or silky. Eventually a short black woman came and offered assistance.
"Hello, can I help you with something?" She inquired with a smile.
"Yes, we need curtains for our den, something that will keep the light out," Michael told her.
"What sort of rod do you have to hang the curtains up with? That is a big part of choosing the curtains you would want," she said.
"I am not really sure, we're pretty new to this whole curtain thing."
"Well the methods of hanging are..." she said and trailed off into an indepth discussion with herself about all the ways of hanging curtains. Minutes pass.
Finally after being lead around three racks of virtually see-through curtains we made it clear to her that we just wanted thick curtains, and would buy whatever mounting we needed to hang them.
"Well these ones are fairly thick..." she began.
"Fine, they're fine," Michael said.
"Now to hang these particular curtains you need one of these rods X inches thick with these hangers, oh wait, they are out of stock, well you could use these ones, yes these would be fine, you need about 6 packs of them..." she muttered.
"Hmm, I don't know, the window isn't that wide really, I think two will do fine," I said.
"Oh no, you need at least 4 packs dear. If it turns out that you don't need them all you could always return them with no loss!" She said brightly.
"Exept for the time wasted to bring back a $3 piece of merchandise," I thought to myself.
So the saleswoman helped us bring all of the curtain supplies to the counter and begun ringing things up. It was approximately 30 minutes after we had walked into the store, and her voice was the least of the things starting to drive us crazy about this experience. To our surprise she started scanning our items, as well as other items sitting on the salescounter. What was she thinking? She put all of the items that were rightfully ours in a bag and announced our total, a startling $160 some odd dollars. Reluctantly Michael handed her the credit card, she put it through, he signed for it and she put the receipt into the bag. Promptly Michael withdrew it as the woman started to walk off to help (hinder?) another couple of customers.
"Wait," Michael said to her sternly.
"Yes?" she said happily.
"What is this, I didn't buy this," Michael said, pointing to a charge on the receipt that clearly was not ours.
"That's these hangers here," she pointed out.
"Then what is this charge?" Michael asked, pointing to a similar one down the receipt.
"Oh, well it looks like I might have rung that up a bit wrong then, let me see..." she says, taking the reciept and looking at it carefully.
She then proceeds to take off a couple of the charges, Michael signs again for it, we depart and head out of the curtain section.
Now neither Michael nor I like to shop, this was a nightmare for us, I wanted to scream and Michael wanted to use the curtain rod to inflict some damage. So we walked to the nearest counter and returned everything, who knows if she got everything off the credit card that she was supposed to? We weren't about to take that risk. The salespeople quickly complied, maybe something on our faces told them not to question.
Contrary to our instincts, we decided to stay in Sears to buy the other item we needed, the vacuum bags.
"Hi, could you show me to the vacuum bags?" Michael asked.
"Sure, they are right that way," said a plump young salesman.
"Uh, over here?" Michael said once we got to a wall near the bathrooms.
"Yeah, you can't miss them, right there!"
"These are the bathrooms..." I muttered.
"Oh, isn't that what you wanted?"
We left. That night we ended up across the county at another Sears store. Everyone at that store was half asleep, no one was jumping up to help, and that was fine with us. We got what we needed and were on our way, for a little over $80.