Karmic Comeuppance at Eckerd

Yesterday, on the way home from work, I stopped at my local Eckerd pharmacy to get some trash bags. As usual, Eckerd didn’t have the type of trash bags I was looking for. But, as usual, Eckerd did tempt me to buy something that I hadn’t intended to. In this case, it was four cans of Bush baked beans for the iminently reasonable price of $5.

So, I awkardly scooped up four cans of beans and headed for the register. But, on the way there I was sidetracked once again. This time, I perchanced to notice that bags of Andy Capp Fries were being sold for just 49 cents a bag. This excited me greatly, but this excitement turned to disappointment when I looked at their selection and only saw Cheddar Fries. I wanted Hot Fries! So, while cradling four cans of baked beans in my left arm, I started to shuffle through bags of Andy Capp fries in search of the elusive Hot. In doing so, I knocked a bag of Cheddar fries to the ground.

After a few seconds of searching through bags of Cheddar, I saw what I was looking for: Hot Fries! In my haste to grab the Hot Fries, however, I dropped a can of baked beans onto the bag of Cheddar Fries that I had knocked to the ground a few moments earlier. The can of beans not only crushed the Cheddar Fries, but split open the bag as well.

Quite simply, I had destroyed this bag of Cheddar Fries. No one else would be able to buy it, and therefore the responsibility to purchase the damaged product fell to me and me alone. But instead of doing so, I simply picked up the bag of Cheddar Fries and laid it across the bottom shelf for someone else to discover. I then walked nonchalantly to the register with four cans of beans and a bag of pristine-condition Andy Capp Hot Fries. I felt bad about my laziness and dishonesty, but apparently this guilt was preferable to taking the crushed and split open bag of Cheddar Fries to the register and explaing the situation.

 Ah, but as I soon learned, one cannot escape God. When the clerk rang up my cans of baked beans, they came up not as four for $5, but at their normal price of $1.39 per can. Therefore, my final total was 56 cents more than it should have been.

Or was it? Upon second thought, I realized that 56 cents was exactly what I owed Eckerd for my transgression regarding the crushed Cheddar Fries: 49 cents for the product itself, and 7 cents for my laziness and dishonesty. So, everything worked out fine in the end, and I left the Eckerd secure in the knowledge that the next time I dropped a can of baked beans on a bag of Cheddar Fries, I would handle the situation differently.