And . . . I Got in Trouble at the Grocery Store

Plenty of eggs at this visit, compared to last time, when there wasn’t an egg to be had.

We needed milk. Also, I’d found a recipe for dinner that I thought I could easily make. I included those ingredients, along with milk, on a short list of things, picked up my recycle bags, and headed off to HEB. I did go at 8:30 a.m., thinking that the shelves wouldn’t be quite as depleted as they’d been when I went in the late afternoon a few days earlier.

The raw eggs are gone, but here, just to the left of the sign, are packages of hard-cooked eggs. Yay! And, quite obviously, is the sign that says, “Limit 2.

Things have really settled down, compared to a few days ago, and there was plenty of parking, close and near the door. The store was busy but not crowded, and I quickly made my way to the aisles where I needed to shop. I put carrots and sugar snap peas in my cart. The canned things I needed were there. The ground beef was there. The milk was there.

When I’d gotten eggs (yes! there were eggs) a couple of days earlier, I’d looked for the packages of hard-cooked eggs that are usually in the egg area. Nope. But, since I was now at the store ‘way earlier than before, I went to look. And, yes. TA-DAH! There were packages of them. I got a couple, and, while I was there, I went ahead and got another carton of the eggs I like to buy.

I stopped in an empty aisle to check how many items I’d gotten. I like to use the self check-out (there’s usually less waiting time), and, there’s a limit of 10 items. Exactly what I had in my cart.

There was absolutely no waiting time; most folks had fully-loaded carts and were in lines at the regular check-outs. I pushed my cart over to a self-checkout slot, put my recycle bag on the shelf, and started scanning my groceries.

After a few items, things stalled, and an HEB employee came over to see what the problem was. (There’s always an employee there to straighten out various self-check snafus.) She looked at my groceries and pointed out that I’d tried to purchase too many eggs.

I’d missed the sign. And, really, even if I’d seen the sign,  I’d have assumed that raw eggs and bagged cooked eggs were different products. FYI-they are not two different products. She let me choose which egg product had to be removed. And I apologized and apologized and apologized some more as I gave her the carton of eggs. I’m not generally a rule-breaker, and I really didn’t know, and I was really sorry. She was not at all angry; I suppose she’d had to confront, gently, other shoppers about too many total items, or too little cash, or too many eggs.

And there you go.