Penny Puss: If you have to question yourself, "should I do this" then maybe you should not.

May 19, 2018

If you have to question yourself, "should I do this" then maybe you should not.

Please remember employees are people too! I am going to assume that most penny shoppers think about this when they shop, but I see a few people here and there asking questions that should be answered easily with common decency rules.
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If you have to question yourself, "should I do this" then maybe you should not. For example, DG's policy reads that they are supposed to sell the penny items if they are on the sales floor. If an employee is packing stuff up to send back and then gets called away from her work, should you really be grabbing stuff that she has pulled? If the boxes were loaded on a roll cart that they use to move inventory around, should you mess with that? I say, "no".

I have also heard that employees have taken stuff out of customers hands. And, no, I don't agree with that either, but it should not change our own good etiquette. We need to be better than this as people. I want the penny stuff as much as the next person, but are the pennies really worth this. The employees have a lot more to do than just clear pennies. In fact, we usually have better idea of what is clearance and pennies ... because we study it. Employees don't have time for that! So we do have an advantage of finding the penny items.

Anyway, I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I kind of felt bad the other day when I found a few pieces of penny clothing at this one store. The cashier was really nice, but she said that she spend hours clearing out the penny clothes and she didn't know where I found them. She said sadly, "why did I bother?"

As I said, I felt bad ... but really didn't know what to say ... I found 4 things in that store. It's not like she's not doing her job ... I didn't get a cart full. I think that some items just look like summer and instead of looking at every single tag and she figured they were summer. Her job was to pull them, and she was probably proud of herself for doing a good job. Most cashiers don't even care when I get pennies ... but this one did. Did you ever mess up? How did you feel? I hate to throw out a bunch of moralistic crap ... but I see these posts going on about getting the pennies at all costs ... and it's kind of disheartening. So, think about that cashier as a person ... not as a block to your pennies!

Also, I wanted to say that I see people telling others to "start recording on your phone" if you run into a problem. That is probably the way to get the problem to escalate (in a bad way) quickly. I don't want you recording me ... and in some states it is actually ILLEGAL to record a person without their permission. So, keep that in consideration.

Here is Pennsylvania law, and although your state laws may be different, recording someone is usually just going to make them angry.
PA ACLU - Know Your Rights When Taking Photos and Making Video and Audio Recordings