Pay What You Owe, Not Necessarily What You're Charged

Don't give away money unless you mean to.

My daughter arrives at my place, works the dog into a frenzy, and throws herself onto the couch. I sit across from her in a chair studying a receipt. 

What are you doing, she asks. Awesome deals at the grocery store today, All savings though, I say in anticipation of her next question, No points. She knows how I love points. She affects mock horror. Hear me out, I say, Real maple syrup, $8 instead of $13; salsa, $3 instead of $5; chocolate bars three for $4 instead of $10, I mention a couple more items, and, finally, Four bags of frozen raspberries, $22 for $22.

Huh?, she says, instantly alert to the larceny. Yes, I say, Raspberries $22 for $22, I was robbed, I wasn’t paying attention, They overcharged me. And you didn’t check the receipt before you left the store, she asks, admonishing, a figurative finger-wag in my direction. My heart fills with pride. My girl. She knows the rule: don’t trust the cash register, it’s programmed by mistake-making humans. I’m checking the receipt now, I say, I’ll get my money.

I’d kept my eye on the monitor at the checkout. I even made a point of asking the cashier when I could expect to see the savings. At the end, he said. I’d already double-fisted my way through the store pushing the cart, app open on my phone in one hand and shopping list in the other, picking off deals one by one. I’d gotten the right size of each thing, the right variety, the right quantity, the right brand. It was the right day of the week. The wind was blowing in the right direction. I was on my game. At the checkout I watched as a sea of red text and numbers finally flooded the screen, the credits, all the savings.  But I didn’t check to see that they were all accounted for. The raspberries. The reduced price wasn’t entered. That’s how easy it is to lose $12. 

It's now sport with me and my kids as well as serious business. When they were young they thought I was just cheap. My preferred adjectives were thrifty and resourceful. There once was a time when I was uncomfortable even deleting computer-generated letters from a computer screen because it seemed like such a waste. Surely there were other sentences in which I could use them, I just needed to save them for later like bread bag ties. I’ve come a long way since then, deleting with abandon, entire paragraphs, in fact. And my kids have come a long way too, shrewd shoppers that they now are.

Receipts, restaurant bills, bank account and credit card statements. They’re all mini money stories. Our money. Our stories. Every one a potential whodunnit. I work to earn my modest income and there’s none to waste, and my least favourite way to lose it is to pay a retailer or service provider more than they’re owed. I’m sure they feel similarly about me and their own money and any mistakes they make in my favour.

My credit card statement is easy to check. I charge a couple thousand dollars a month, all of it on one card for the points it gives me. It takes five minutes to check the charges. Last month I saw “NYTIMES*NYTIMES $23.00,” a monthly auto-bill for a digital subscription. I owe them money, no debate, but what happened to the $4 a month I agreed to? How did the price jump five hundred percent? In absolute dollars it’s only $19 a month out of the two thousand but over the course of the year that’s almost $240. I always think in terms of the annualized amount. That gives me the necessary oomph and indignation to persist with getting my money back. The New York Times’ customer service is superlative, however; no indignation required.  

As for rewards—points, cash, and miles—they also appear on statements but depending on your reward type it might be easier to check using the receipt when the deal is still fresh in your mind. Why exactly did I buy ten boxes of Sprouted Grain with Seeds Melba Toast? Right. The 8,000 points the purchase gave me, the equivalent of $8 in cash. Points missing? Not a problem. My rewards provider has an online portal with a dispute transaction tool, I don’t even have to talk to a human being. My only job is to check the receipt and see whether there’s anything I’m owed. 

No one in my family’s rich but we’re the Arnault’s, reportedly the world’s wealthiest family, when it comes to tales of epic savings conquests. We boast. We brag. It’s in our blood. We come from discount royalty, both my parents inveterate deal finders. I’ll never achieve my mother’s prowess, a woman who once left a grocery store with more money than she’d started, handed money at the checkout because she’d shopped the store into a deficit using their own promotions: sales, reduced items, double value coupon days. The only money I’ve ever received from a grocery store was the twenty-five dollar court-ordered gift card it gave me and every other customer in Canada after losing a class action suit for price-fixing bread. 

I drive my daughter back to her place after supper and stop at the grocery store with app and receipt in hand to repatriate my twelve dollars worth of raspberry savings. It’s not a problem, no one objects, the store readily surrenders it. But if I didn’t ask they’d just as happily keep it and since it’s all the same to them I think I’ll just hang onto it. That and all the other seemingly minor mistakes I find add up to amounts worth having.