Washington State imposes a user fee on plastic bags. It's 8 cents plus 1 cent sales tax, so it's 9 cents. While about a fourth of our guests bring in their own bag, and a majority don't want a bag and just carry their items or place them back in their cart, about a fourth of guests purchase our very nice heavy-duty plastic bags.
In theory, when a guest places an online order they are asked if they want plastic bags or not. Well, due to the intricate details of getting drive-up and order pick-up fulfillment in an accurate manner, some orders are placed in bags. When they come up to the service desk or we bring their stuff out to their vehicle, we usually ask if they want the bags but sometimes when there are distractions (the drive-up app has another honk-honk signifying yet another Drive-Up has arrived, or there's a long line of folks at the service desk), we forget to ask.
Well, a few days ago had a drive-up desk whose order was fulfilled within two bags. I overlooked asking if they wanted the bags, sometimes the system bypasses the "bag quantity" question and doesn't even charge for the bags. I forgot to ask, or to zero out the bags. This guest really became annoyed and grouchy about the two bags. He was evidently really ticked off at paying the 18 cents, even given that our order-pickup service has no service charge (free) and he can't even buy the tiniest fraction of a gallon of gas. I told him I had no way of reversing the charge on our system, he could come inside. I had two other drive-ups which had arrived and had to hustle....... well.......
While he was quite pushy and irritating, he wasn't overtly rude. He eventually came in the store to service desk, fortunately I was able to help him and just took the 18 cents out of the drawer, told him we have to hustle and apologized. I told my ETL after leaving a post-it note about the 18 cents. He said I did the right thing.
This struck me as an example where a guest used up a lot of his own time, and a great deal of our time, trying to be right about a really trivial matter. It kind of annoyed me for awhile, he wanted to keep talking about this and I just wanted him to take the refunded money, leave us the bags if he truly didn't want them. Reminds me of an old story called "Rage Over a Lost Penny".