Our cart is full, we're about to check out, and the kids spot a sample station. Frozen Pizza. 1/4 inch by 1/4 inch sections of pizza. Each sample- including the hourly wage needed to pay the worker- costs approximately $.05!
My kids beeline for it and grab 3- one for me, one for each of them. It's literally seconds after they do this and the woman working the stand scoffs at them and says "how many are you going to take?". Tone is hard to communicate with the written word, but you get my drift.
Papa bear alert.
I turn my head and say 'excuse me? There's three of us. I don't need one, though' so I ask one of my children to put mine back.
She doesn't say anything, but her body language says it all. Moments like these are like forks in the road. I can either 'go there' and have the discussion or decide to leave it alone and walk away. 9 times out of 10 I go with the latter option; this time, however, was the 10th time.
I ask the woman, somewhat sharply, "is there a problem?". Her answer will soon decide if we do indeed have a problem.
She answers wisely, "no" and so I too non-verbally agree to move on.
From the customer service angle, this is a loss for HyVee. With $100 in my cart, the several stops our family makes there each week, not to mention the thousands of dollar in business our church does with them (through selling their gift cards), to risk all of that for this woman's opinion on my kids and their taking of $.15 worth of pizza is misguided to say the least.
But from the parenting angle, what I really wanted to say was this: "I've got this. I am ok with my kids taking a sample. My children while children are still human beings and fully capable of interacting with you, an adult, at a grocery store. Their dad- me- is spending lots of money here. I realize for you the sample is bait, but honestly, the sample is a cost of doing business. It's no different then the free cookie in the bakery or the Chinese sample my kids got earlier, both stops where they were treated as human beings, and not as leeches or sponges. Had my kids treated your sample as an all you could eat buffet, rest assured, I would have said something. But since they didn't, I think you owe them an apology, not the other way around".
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