You Get What You Give

Penn and I saved a ton of money at the grocery store on Saturday. The thing is, we didn't exactly save it in an entirely honest way. And yet I also don't feel bad about our savings. I've justified the following story in two ways:
1) Sometimes you just get lucky
2) The cashier really is an idiot, and that's not my fault

Here's what happened:
Because we're getting old we spent most of Saturday morning and afternoon running errands. We went to Home Depot for light bulbs, returned some books at the public library, and then went to the grocery store. (Aren't we exciting? Does it make us seem more or less lame if I tell you that we then spent Saturday night using the iPowerHour application by ourselves? There's such a fine line between "trying desperately to hold on to your foolish, fleeting youth" and "pathetic", isn't there?)
We do a big shopping trip together every two weeks or so, and that's what we were doing on Saturday. We anticipated paying about $200 for groceries since we were out of pretty much everything. So we did our usual grocery-buying routine: I had the list of our basics plus ingredients I need for recipes and as I went around comparing prices and grabbing only items on my list, Penn kept disappearing and reappearing with things that were definitely NOT on the list. Things like pistachios and smoked salmon, for example. I mean, I'm all for delicious pistachios and smoked salmon (which is why these things ended up in our cart), but the man is the definition of "impulse shopper." Anyway, we got everything we needed, plus a dozen lemons because we're trying to make our own limoncello.
We finished our shopping and made our way to the shortest checkout line. I realized pretty quickly that we'd picked the wrong line. I turned to Penn and whispered, "This is the same stupid girl we had a few weeks ago, isn't it?" The girl is a teenager, obviously pretty new at the store, and the last time she checked us out it took twice as long as it normally does because she couldn't figure out how to ring up any of the produce and she didn't get how to use coupons and blah, blah, blah, it was ANNOYING. And normally I'm sympathetic to people that are in training, but this particular girl doesn't seem to take direction well. I've watched more seasoned employees try to explain things to her and she's always like, "I did that. I already did that! I know!" She's just stupid. Seriously. In fact, as we walked up to the line on Saturday she was once again screwing up the checkout process, getting all confused about coupons and frustrating the customer in front of us. We almost got in another line at that point, but since I'd already started loading our groceries onto the conveyor belt we decided to just take our chances.
And I am so, so glad we didn't move to another line! First, she rang up our produce. We had the lemons in two separate bags because we took all the organic lemons in the store but still needed a few more so we had one bag of regular lemons and one bag of organic lemons. So she typed in the number on the organic lemon sticker...and then put all of the organic lemons into our cart. Then she typed in the number on the regular lemon sticker...and put the entire bag of regular lemons into our cart. And then she said, "Oh!" and I thought, "She's going to catch her mistake. She's going to realize that she only charged us for two lemons instead of twelve." But no. She talked herself out of it! She literally went, "Oh, wait...no, okay, never mind," and then went on ringing up the other groceries! I'll admit I felt a little bit of a qualm at that moment. But then I thought to myself, "Well, maybe the scale weighed the lemons? I thought lemons were sold individually and not by weight, but what do I know? And she seems to think everything is okay." So I didn't say anything.
She rang up the rest of the groceries and our total, as predicted, was about $175. Penn and I split the grocery bill, but we don't split it in half because I don't eat as much as my caveman, meat-eating boyfriend. We generally just decide on the spot the fairest way to split the bill. Usually it's about a 65/35 split, other times I'll take on more of the bill if I'm buying a lot of random spices or girlie hair products or whatever. On Saturday we decided that Penn would pay $100 and I would pay the rest. Normally this isn't a problem at all. We go to the same store at least 2-3 times a month, and the other cashiers understand the process of allowing us to put part of the total on one card and part on another. This particular stupid cashier has even split the bill for us before. I guess she didn't remember how to do it, though (I suppose it doesn't happen that often), so she called another cashier over for help. The other cashier explained the process, the stupid teenager cashier claimed that she understood. So Penn swiped his card and paid $100 and requested $40 cash back. And then I went to swipe my card and the computer screen said I owed $35. Penn said, "Wait, this is wrong. I only paid $100, not $140. I wanted forty dollars cash back." And the cashier said, "It's fine. After she swipes her card it will charge her $75 and then the drawer will open and I'll give you the $40." With a dubious, "Okay...." I swiped my card, Penn got his $40 in cash, and we left the store with our $10 worth of free lemons.
And then I checked my bank statement today and it turns out I really was charged only $35 on Saturday. So we actually paid only $135 of the $175 bill since Penn got his $40 cash. Thanks to the mix-ups of a single (dopey) cashier, we got $50 of free groceries!
I'm pretty sure she won't have a job at the grocery store for too much longer. And really, that's probably for the best. I would feel bad for her if she wasn't such an idiot. Really. And it's not that she's just stupid, I'm sympathetic toward stupid people. It's that she's stupid AND mouthy. She doesn't even want to learn how to do her job properly.

Seriously, I never know what to do in these situations. I find that I'm about half-and-half: half the time, even if the mistake is in my favor, I'll point it out to the person at the store/restaurant. The other half of the time I figure it's their mistake and the universe's way of giving me a lucky break and I let it go. In this case, I sort of noticed the $40 mix-up on Saturday but I believed the cashier when she said it would come out right somehow. It wasn't until today that I actually realized my savings, and now it seems pointless to go back to the store. And, honestly, a lot of it has to do with the personality of the person waiting on me in the first place. If this girl hadn't made my shopping experience annoying on more than one occasion prior to Saturday, and if she just wasn't so stupid I probably would have told her she'd made a mistake.

I don't know if this makes me a bad person. I'm pretty sure it just makes me a normal person. Sometimes you get screwed, sometimes you get an accidental bargain. I guess in the long run it all evens out.