Shopping Experience

We were over in Cancun shopping a bit yesterday. I had a very different experience at Papeleria Cancun that I thought I would share with you. PC is a giant stationary store that sells everything from staples to bibles. They have a fairly good selection of cotton yarn and beads.


I put 8 skeins of yarn, 12 packages of beads and 18 meters of cording in my basket and proceeded to the check out. Everything was going fine until she announced the total. A whopping 932 pesos! That's almost $93 USD! For that little bit of stuff? I was trying to figure it out but just couldn't get my head around it. I'm not the best when it comes to math. I usually can only count to 21 if I am naked. I knew the total was wrong but didn't know why. So I emptied my wallet and pockets and paid the bill. Then I went downstairs to reconnoiter with B and L who were waiting. (this store has three floors)

I filled them in and showed them the receipt. Immediately one item stood out. It said I bought something green. I didn't buy anything green. And I didn't buy any one little item that would have cost 127.10 pesos. So back upstairs with my purchases and receipt in hand. Of course, the cash register was now closed up there and no sign of the girl that had rung me up. So I looked around and saw a lady who looked like she had a stick up her butt and was acting all stuck up and important like to the other girls. I headed over to her. She had to be the floor manager.


I briefly explained my problem and dumped all my purchases out onto the counter where she had busily gluing fake Christmas packages together. She got on the walkie-talkie and called the register girl. They hunkered down over the receipt and purchases. Part of the procedure there, when you buy certain items like a few meters of cording, is that they write the product number down on a slip of paper and give it to you. At the cash register they key it in and it charges you X times the amount you bought.

My receipt said that I bought 10 of 4357. They immediately saw the mistake. It should have been 2 of 4357. So the manager with the stick up her butt sent me and cashier girl back to the cash register to ring it all up again. This time when she gets to 4357, it came up the same 127.10 pesos! For two meters of cording??? I protested and she refused to do anything about it. I told her that the wrong number must have been written down. She refused to call up to the department to check. So I grabbed all the pieces of cording I had, took the list with the numbers on it and went back to the third floor myself. It was her turn to wait.

We checked the numbers against what I had bought and what was written. Sure enough, the salesclerk had the written the number for a whole roll of cording, not just the per meter number. She corrected it and back downstairs I went. I gave the girl the new slip, she entered the number and all was fine with the world again. And I got a $51 dollar refund. Sweet.

One of the things I just don't understand about this store is that even though almost everything has a UPC code on it, they refuse to scan anything. For instance the little bags of beads. Instead of scanning each bag, she individually hand types the product number on it into the computer. Like this: 586797445-27 Can you see the room for error here? Transpose or type one wrong digit and you have boughten yourself a totally different product. It pays to watch your receipt very closely.

There are many problems and frustrations outlined in this post regarding trying to do any shopping here and how different it is from where I came from. But, I have learned the hard way, if you are patient, not rude, gently insistent and refuse to give up, you will eventually have everything turn out alright.