The Day I Shop-lifted

That was the first time, and probably, it would be the last time too.

Okay, before you turn against me, let me tell you, there’s a reason why I did that. I recently bought a sipper for my baby. Turned out that it was not the exact one that she fancied. It costed me 325 bucks, so I couldn’t scrap it either. So, I had to exchange it. But, to my grief, I lost the bill. Earlier, when I tried to exchange a dress in another shop, without the bill, the shop keeper issued a duplicate bill to me. Using the duplicate bill, I exchanged the dress. I hoped that the same thing would happen in this case, too.

So, I went to the Customer Service Desk and told them the problem. They flatly said that nothing would be exchanged without a bill. Their argument was: how would they know that it was bought from the same shop? They had a point. But, hey, given the date and time of purchase, couldn’t they track it back? I felt they were just being lazy to go back and do the research. The easiest thing for them to do was to simply deny the exchange.

I turned to leave when an idea struck me. I went to the place where the baby stuff was arranged. I placed the one I had to exchange, and picked another one of my choice (or, rather, my baby’s choice). It was priced a lot less than what I bought earlier. So I picked a packet of cashew to sum up to the price of the original sipper that I wanted to return. Thankfully, I have a huge bag that can accommodate a medium-sized water melon. J

I slowly passed the bill counter as if I had bought nothing. Kudos to my acting skills! I was happy that, finally, I got the ones that I needed, without being caught. God knows what would have happened if I were caught. But, hey, I made sure that it was almost the same price as the sipper. So, this doesn’t actually come under stealing. What do you think?