Discretion

While at work yesterday I received a call from Kate, and she was in tears over a shopping experience. I will attempt to relate the incident as it was relayed to me. Kate had to make her usual grocery trip to Costco and chose to do so while Whitney was at school. During checkout, our three younger children waited in the shopping cart while the cashier scanned Kate’s items. Before completing the transaction the cashier looked at our children, then looked over at the young man helping her and said to him, “People in Utah have way too many kids.” She made no attempt to lower her voice. The young man replied with a “Yeah.”
Kate couldn’t say anything to the cashiers and barely made it out of the store before starting to cry. She called me at work and asked me to call the store manager, because she knew she couldn’t do it right then. I called the store, and was met by the same girl who had made that comment to my wife. So I put on my best professional voice and said, “Hi. My name is Chris and I am calling from the Admitting office at University Hospital. I need to talk to a store manager or shift lead.” The young woman put me right through to the store manager. I expressed my concerns to the store manager, who was sympathetic and assured me that the actions of her employees would not be tolerated.
My concerns were thus. Employees have their own opinions and they have a right to those opinions. However, when operating as a seller of goods, they are not in the the appropriate venue to express said opinions. A person does not make that kind of a comment unless he or she is trying to elicit a response. Well, she got a response. And the response was that my wife was embarrassed to set foot in the store again, and sad that someone would feel that one of her children shouldn’t exist. It is amusing, however, that the girl thought that Kate’s three children were too many, when Kate only had 75% of our children with her at the time.

It also amuses me that the cashier was lamenting the fact that people in Utah have large families while working for a store like Costco. Why does she think that places like Costco and Sam’s Club are so successful in Utah? It is because people have large families and many mouths to feed, so they buy in bulk at places such as wholesalers. But I doubt that the girl has the capacity to think that broadly, or that she’d even care. She probably makes minimum wage, and is just collecting a paycheck.
The day of the incident the kids were sitting in the cart behaving themselves. I would be more sympathetic to the girl’s aversion of kids if my kids had been acting out. But they weren’t. One of Patrick’s most famous incidents happened in a Costco. He was in the cart and wanted to get out. Kate said no, so he stood up and took a swan dive onto a palliate of shirts. Kate’s mother was present for that episode and nearly blew a gasket. I would like for the cashier to have been there that day to witness P at his worst. But on this day he was behaving.

I would really like Kate to go back to Costco with all four of our children and go through the same checker’s line while giving her ‘the finger’ and saying, “Look, bitch. I’ve got more kids with me this time. Is four too many?” But Kate is far too nice to do something like that. So I’ll have to use my imagination. But I’ll bet I could get my father-in-law to go through the girl’s line and say in front of her, “There are far too many ugly girls working at Costco nowadays.” That would fix her wagon.