$8000 bottle of shampoo

I went to Target yesterday to pick up a few things, just some non-perishable groceries, before I went to the gym. I didn't want to get anything that had to be refrigerated, because I didn't want to go home before the gym, and I didn't want to leave anything perishable in the trunk.

But I didn't want to buy any more than I had to at the regular store, because their prices are so much higher.

I'd wait and get ground beef, sour cream, yogurt, etc., at the grocery store, but get things like paper towels, soft drinks, canned goods, at Target.

So I got the paper towels, Diet Coke, Diet 7-Up, canned green beans and mushrooms and black olives, some dry-roasted peanuts, tea bags. Not a lot of stuff, and I'll probably have to back today because I totally failed to get anything for this week. But that's okay. I like Target. And, since I like it, I wandered around awhile after I picked out the groceries. I've been wanting some more sleeveless tops, so I checked the clearance racks. The seasons, as far as store merchandise go, change so soon that there doesn't seem to be any point in buying things at full price.

Like I said the other day, I already bought a couple of swimsuits that were on clearance, and it's still May. They'll probably have heavy sweaters in the stores in another week or two, and all the summer stuff will be half off.

I couldn't find any sleeveless t-shirts, but I did find a couple of exercise bra-tops, one striped and one French blue. Exercise stuff is so expensive that I always check for it on the clearance racks to see if I can scrounge something. There's a lot of really cute stuff out there, but I'm not going to pay full price for it. I go to a women-only gym, after all, so it's not like I'm trying to impress anyone.

So I got those, and I picked up a bottle of electric blue nail polish, and as I was going down the hair care aisle, I checked for the Matrix/Biolage stuff that I use on my hair. Sometimes they have it, sometimes they don't, but if they do, it saves me a trip to the beauty supply place. So I looked, and they had one bottle of the shampoo I use, so I picked it up. Their "salon" stuff is a little weird--it's like it's not really supposed to be there or something, like it fell off a truck.

I'm sure it didn't, but it's not exactly like picking up a bottle of Herbal Essence or something. There was no price on the bottle, and no ticket on the shelf to say what it cost. The other Biolage products had prices, but not this one. So I figured it would end up being a problem at the checkout, but it didn't really matter--if they couldn't figure out what to charge me for it, or if it was too much, I just wouldn't buy it. No great loss.

The clerk rang up my stuff. The shampoo didn't scan, of course, but she did something with the numbers, put them in manually, scanned the last few things, then as I was getting ready to put my debit card into the machine, she turned around to tell me the total and said, "Whoa."

The display on the cash register read, "$8,052.36."

She started laughing, and I said, "Wow, that was some expensive bottle of shampoo." She started looking at the receipt, and paging through what I'd bought, and trying to figure out if she could fix it, but even though she deleted the item and rang it in again, it still came up the same price. So she called for help.

A young man came over, and his eyes got big when he looked at the cash register display. He couldn't help it, he looked at the stuff in my cart to see if I could possibly have bought $8,000 worth of stuff. "It was the shampoo," I told him. "You know, one of the expensive ones."

It really was pretty funny, and everyone was laughing; in the hilarity, the clerk managed to void my entire order, and we had to put everything back up on the counter so she could re-scan it. The young man helped with that--we were all one big happy family by that point.

Then she got to the shampoo. She held it up and asked me if I remembered what it cost. Something less than $8,000 was all I knew . . .

This is the funniest thing, actually: a woman was walking by, wheeling her full cart, heading for the doors, and she called out, "$10.99--I just had the same thing happen!" Seemed fairly unlikely, but $10.99 sounded about right--certainly better than $8,000--and I nodded at the clerk and she rang it up for that. The total ended up being around $62. The young man was still hanging around, and he said, "Much better!" and I said, "Hey, anytime I can save $8,000, I'll take it."

The clerk was still confused about what had happened, and she finally figured out that when the shampoo had gone through the scanner, it had said it wasn't in the system, and had asked her to put the price in manually. But she looked up too late, and thought that what it was asking her for was a barcode, and she already had the next item in her hand--the bottle of nail polish. So she dutifully entered in the UPC, which the register interpreted as the price.

And then, when I was driving out of the parking lot, telling the story to Bob on the phone, Superman was standing on the curb, holding a sign advertising $19.99 oil changes. Quite the exciting day.