Honesty Is The Best Policy OR The Power Of Guilt

I went shopping at Kohl's a little over a week ago. They usually have a fun selection of t-shirts that are available for the wonderfully low price of $5. I like to stock up.

I get home, we get busy wearing t-shirts, days go by. Eventually I pull out the receipt to work on our finances, and I realized that we weren't charged for one of the t-shirts. I wondered why I hadn't caught the mistake at the store, and I think the reason was that I had done one of those general calculations of "this should cost me approximately $XX amount of dollars" and since the total was in that approximation, I never missed that it was $5 off. What to do? What to do? I could just keep the t-shirt, after all, I gave it to the cashier to ring up. It's not MY fault she missed one.

But, my conscience wouldn't allow me to do that, so I packed up the kids and headed to Kohl's. I'll be honest, this wasn't the only reason I headed to Kohl's - I had earned a $10 gift certificate during my t-shirt shopping spree and I wanted to spend it.

At the Customer Service department, I told them my story. The cashier was a little surprised, but rang me up for my $5 t-shirt AND let me use my gift certificate to pay for it. Bonus: when the t-shirt rang up, it didn't charge me tax. The cashier told me not to worry about it (Woohoo! Guilt free!).

So we finished our shopping trip by buying The Princess a new pair of tennis shoes. They are a very sparkly silver, with pink acccents, and a picture of Tinkerbell. And they light up. And they were on sale, so they only cost me $15 (with my coupon) instead of the normal $40 something.

And I am guilt free.