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On a sunny Saturday afternoon in August, Celeste Teale and her husband, David C. Fischer, visited Blain’s Farm & Fleet in Baraboo in hopes of finding three specific items: a bulk roll of .065-inch string for Dave’s Black & Decker weed wacker, a 22-inch blade for his Craftsman walk-behind mower, and an air filter for the Briggs & Stratton engine on that same mower. They found none of these.
Teale and Fischer did find, however, and they purchased, an excellent Hermes, made-in-U.S.A., 34-inch men’s leather belt priced at just about a dollar an inch, full price, and three ladies’ items on clearance, namely a blue waffle tie-neck sweatshirt, a same-color-blue terry pant, and a pair of Anywear Women’s Zone Kaleidoscope Nursing Clogs, size 9. The total bill for those four items came to one hundred dollars and nine cents, with tax. Dave felt a little bad about the purchase, not particularly because the prices seemed crazy, which they did, but because he suspected he and Celeste might have been undercharged by three dollars.
You see, when they went to check out, their cashier could not find a barcode or price on the shoes. Dave thought he knew the price, because Celeste had tried on clogs in a different style, different brand, in size 10, before choosing the so-called Kaleidoscope pair in size 9, and Dave had noticed the ones she chose were costlier, Dave was sure. But, at the register, he did not volunteer the price; instead, he waited while the cashier called someone on her walkie talkie and described the shoes. It took her two tries, and then, when she announced the price, “Twenty-four eighty-eight,” Dave saw that another customer was placing his purchases on the checkout conveyor, and Dave didn’t want to cause further delay, so he said, “That’s fine,” and the cashier called out a total, and Dave slid his credit card into the reader. He had remembered the correct price as twenty-seven eighty-eight. It is possible he was wrong.
Leaving the store, Dave felt a little larcenous, and, for a day or two or three afterwards, the transaction continued to nag at his conscience. He was pretty sure if the cashier had gone the other way with the three-dollar discrepancy and said, “Thirty dollars and eighty-eight cents,” he would have protested, probably would not have meekly said, “That’s fine.”
In a week, though, a week or a little more, Dave put aside his guilt over his ill-gotten gain. The thought occurred to him, comfortingly though not one hundred percent convincingly, that maybe Farm & Fleet had actually owed him an offset of three bucks for the inconvenience they’d caused by requiring him and Celeste to go elsewhere in search of their late-season yard care supplies.
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