Worst Case Scenario

I once got a call from a foreign client who said that a customer came back to his megastore to return an item that she bought the previous day, only to find that it was not on her sales slip.

This represented a worst case scenario for us.

The allegation was that the cashier had scanned the product but that the customer had not been charged for it.

As a software house, of all the problems a client might report, this one was as bad as it gets. If this was possible then everything we had done over three decades was unreliable, and I imagined everything turning to dust.

We took this seriously and asked for more information, before raising the alarm that would have us fly out to him.

What they sent was devastating. The entire paper trail together with actual recorded video footage proving that the cashier had scanned each and every product. When faced with this we were forced to admit fault but requested six hours to examine the data.

That night I examined the transaction history and couldn't find anything wrong. Everything was perfect yet the client was simply not charged for some of the items.

Then as an afterthought, I looked at the preceding sale and an "unlikely" scenario became apparent.

Two sisters with the same initials and the same surname went shopping together.

They shared the same trolley and bought mostly the same items with a few differences.

Both paid by card and took their slips with their credit card receipts attached.

On their way out they presented the slips to the security at the door and he gave the wrong slip to the wrong sister. Seeing as their initials and surname were the same and the items so similar the ladies didn't notice until one of them came back the next day to return an item that just happened to be on the slip that was with her sister.

Case closed.

M Parak
April 2019

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