So one night a few weeks ago, I go into a Ralphs Market about 2:30 AM. There are two young men in their twenties, both with spiked hair in unnatural colors. They're loading a shopping cart with food but they're also dining as they shop. They've opened a couple of bags of chips and cookies, plus they've opened and are swigging from bottles of Snapple from the refrigerator case.
There's one checkout line open at this hour and way more shoppers than it can handle. I'm two behind them.
The checker rings them up and it comes to about $40. The one with the lavender hair swipes a credit card…and it is declined or rejected or whatever the term is. "No problem," he announces. He has another credit card…but it too is n.g. "You'll have to pay with cash," the checker tells him. Which he'd do if he had any. Lavender Head says he doesn't have a cent on him. Neither does his friend with the puce crewcut. So what do we do now?
The checker takes away the unopened groceries and does a quick total on the ones that have been opened and about half-consumed. It's about twelve dollars. "Do you have the twelve dollars?" he asks the duo.
"No, it's like I told you," Lavender says. "All I have is these credit cards." Puce nods in agreement. Lavender tries to convince him that he has no choice but to charge the purchases to one of the cards. "They're both good, I swear."
The checker explains that the system there will not allow him to charge a card that doesn't verify. "Can you call someone to come bring you twelve dollars?" No, says Lavender, he can't do that either.
The checker calls over the Night Manager and there's a discussion. In the meantime, the line of folks who want to pay and take their groceries home is stretching clear back to the meat case. The whole episode took about fifteen minutes until they told the kids to just go. Mr. Lavender shouted an apology to the line for holding things up (it sounded about as sincere as Rush Limbaugh's to Sandra Fluke) and then he and his crony left.
The store employees and many in the line grumbled about those worthless bums who had no cash and invalid credit cards. "Those cards were obviously stolen," someone said. Another shopper said, "And I'll bet they knew the cards were no good and that they'd get away without paying at all."
Meanwhile, the shopper after them paid with cash and so did the next person. Then came me. I swiped my American Express card…and it was declined. Beginning to suspect what was going on here, I swiped my Visa card. Also declined. The checker recognized me as a loyal customer and told the Night Manager, who opened up another checkout station and switched my total over there. I swiped the Amex card on this card reader and it verified fine. These things happen.