How Conveeeeeenient!

Val's alter ego has been know to refer to Walmart as The Devil's Playground. It's a moniker that could be referring to their business practices, their customer service, their merchandise, the behavior of their customers, or the once-or-twice behavior of Val's then-young children, who were shown the error of their ways forthwith.

Yes, since Sam Walton kicked the bucket, I'm of the opinion that the person running Walmart is the devil in disguise. Not even in disguise! Just the plain old devil. My Sunday shopping experience did nothing to change my mind.

Let the record show that Val loves her Chicken Bacon Ranch Pinwheels from the Walmart Deli. She has them for lunch every day. A typical trip to Walmart garners her up to four lunches. Yeah. I don't care if they go a couple days past date. I just peel off the wilty lettuce. I've been buying these pinwheels for a long time. I am well aware of their price. $2.98. For that, you get four pinwheels, which are chicken and cheddar cheese, with (hopefully) a little strip of bacon, and a piece of romaine lettuce, wrapped in a flour tortilla spread with ranch dressing.

Sunday, I only picked up two pinwheels, because I had two still at home in FRIG II to eat first. When I wrote down the amount of my receipt in T-Hoe on the parking lot, I thought the total was a little high. So I looked over my receipt, trying to tell myself it was just the pack of AA batteries, and the 9-roll back of toilet paper, and the 3-pack of Puffs With Lotion that jacked up the total. THEN I noticed that my pinwheels were not on the receipt, but something listed as SUBS was. Nuh uh. I didn't buy SUBS. And the price was $5.98 EACH!

I was pretty mad, but not mad enough to load all my stuff back out of T-Hoe and into the cart and go back inside and stand in line at the service center. It was time for the after-church rush, and I wasn't in a mood for waiting in line to argue.

Well! I should have at least gotten out and looked in my bags in the back of T-Hoe. Because when I got home, I saw that indeed, my OLD pinwheels were marked with the right price, but the NEW ones were marked $5.98. In a very fishy manner.

Here's the old ones, the regular label:

Apparently, pinwheels cost the outrageous unit price of $9.54 per pound, which is not such a big deal when you're only buying five oz of them. You can see here that I have already sliced open my label for lunch, before I took the picture. Still, you can see the dates, the price, and the weight.

Compare that to Sunday's pinwheels:

Still unopened, their label says they cost $4.78 per pound. So you'd think they'd be cheaper, right? WRONG! Not when you're being charged for 20 oz !!! Seriously? In what world could those very same pinwheels in that very same package weigh 20 oz ?

I'm so mad! I'm stomping my foot right this very minute, and I swear, no kids better try to walk across my lawn and/or pull up campaign signs!

The checker had no way of knowing. She just scanned it as packaged. I've had this problem before, and noticed the $5.98 price before putting it in my cart. I asked a worker in the deli about it, why the shelf sticker said $2.98, and the product said $5.98. The only (unsatisfactory) answer I got was, "I guess they went up." At that point, I put it back on the shelf, and didn't buy that day. The next several shopping trips revealed the price to be back at $2.98, so I forgot about it.

Yes, the devil has ripped me off for $6 on those two packages of pinwheels. I'm going to eat my pinwheels, and not drag them across the county to visit the devil. But I AM going to take back my receipt and the washed-out empty packages, and demand to know why I was overcharged. Looks like somebody put the wrong label on the packages. How conveeeeeenient!

The devil shall rue the day he played fast and loose with Val's pinwheels.