Satisfying, but ethically unsound

I detest 'the weekly shop'. I've tried joining the late night zombies, I've tried joining the lonely singles on a Monday or Tuesday evening, I've tried shouldering my way through the family groups on a Saturday mid-morning - whatever the human foam (I wanted to type 'scum') washing through the aisles, it can't disguise the battleground of psychological warfare that is the supermarket.

A topic for another time.

In any case, on this particular evening, my retail joy received its capstone in the form of a surly, tattooed checkout wallah who betrayed both physical and social stigmata of falling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Usually at the checkout I simulate 'we'll-get-through-this-together', although it probably comes across as some Victorian disdain of the mercantile classes. That night, somewhere between the inarticulate grunts, the uncooperative plastic bag dispenser (no, no green 'bags for life' for me) and the unneccessary bruising of my fruit selection, I lost all sympathy for the employee side of retail hell.

But even Jove nods.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but my groceries for the week will taste all the sweeter as a result of a cash back request being entered as cash tendered, by my Neanderthal till operative, the upshot being that the face value of the notes handed me was also subtracted from my bill to pay by card. A trolleyful of mediocre comestibles (including a now rather bruised pineapple) for the princely sum of 93p.

Let's be clear. I did feel some dim stirring of guilt, a moments' consideration for pointing out the error and saving the poor lad from a till coming up £40 short at the end of the shift. But I allowed the misanthropy and avarice engendered by fighting off the machinations of the retail psychologists and then dealing with the perfect embodiment of the cashier from hell to quash this glimmer of honesty and fellow feeling. Does that make me a bad person?

I polled my work colleagues on the following morning. On balance, it looks like it does. Oderint dum metuant.