tell me again how much i saved?!

a few years ago i used to work at target. that glorious haven: the store that has everything. this is in no way a bashing of target, because despite some of the interesting things that happened while i worked there, i actually thoroughly enjoyed it. it's a great company to work for, and i would recommend it to anyone. anyway, target most definitely has one of the most interesting clientele that a store can have. mainly because everyone can find something they need there. so while i was there, i developed some theories about the people who shop there, and i'll share one of them now.

we will call this meta-frugality: a word i just made up (well at least i think i did) that describes commenting or bringing attention to your own frugal-ness.

this is a common action i observed while ringing up people's items. i cannot be sure if it just made people feel better about all the money they saved, or if they just needed to be reassured that they were not spending more money than they thought. but it went like this:

i would say about 95 percent of the time i rung up an item that was on sale, the customer would verbally double check that it rang up for the price that it was on sale for. for example, let's say that water picks were on sale for $19.88, this is how the situation would play out:

me, holding the water pick over the scanner, across the bar code
BEEP (success!)
customer: that was $19.88 right?
me: uh, yeah
customer (with a suddenly more reassured confident face): okay, good.

now normally, this would just seem like regular conversation, but i began to notice that it happened ALL the time, and multiple times during the ringing up process. i mean, if someone was buying all items that were on sale, they would ask it after every item was rung up. or even worse, they would shake it up and ask, "how much was that?" which of course would make my reply much more complicated, since i would have to look at the screen and repeat the numbers. much harder than just saying "uh yeah."

my conclusion from this whole thing is that people just LOVE to hear about how much they saved. it's as if my reassuring them that the price on their item was in fact the sale price, i am actually saying "congratulations! you did it! you got it for only $19.88. what a deal!" which when you really think about it is kind of pathetic. it's not like getting something on sale is any great feat. especially when it is something from target, which usually means that there are five hundred of the same item, for the same sale price. it's not as if you picked out the only one out of the stack that was on sale.

and i'll tell you, this action was not limited to expensive items that people were really getting deals on. i mean this was no $500 saving on a plasma screen tv. this was 50 cents on the mega roll of toliet paper. all i can say is that from someone who loves to get deals herself, save the congratulations for when you get home. or pat yourself on the back on your own time, because chances are, the cashier probably doesn't give a fuck.