The quarter thief

It was the summer of 2015 and Paul and I had just moved from California to New Jersey. This was our 2nd PCS, or permanent change of station for non military folk, and neither of us had ever been to New Jersey, aside from our house hunting trip a few months earlier. A few weeks after we settled into our temporary housing, I ventured out to find a grocery store to stock our temporary fridge.

The main grocery store chain in New Jersey is called ShopRite, and having lived the entirety of my adult life on the West coast, I had never been to one or even heard of it before I pulled into the parking lot.

I parked my car and headed towards the front door. I was walking behind a man who was having a very lively conversation on his cell phone. He was waving his arms around, talking loudly and overall had a lot of energy coming off of him. He stopped at the stack of carts by the front door and was spending a longer time than normal getting his cart out of the stack. The majority of his body was blocking my view, so I assumed he was having issues since he was also in the middle of his very exuberant phone call. I slowed to give him some time and right at that exact moment a lady was rolling her cart up to the front to put it away. Since this loud guy was in the way and taking forever, I decided I would swoop in and save the day.

I put my hand on the end of her cart, gave her a huge grin and said, “Oh thanks, I’ll take that!” To me, this felt like a totally normal ritual, one that I had performed many times before in parking lots all across the country. Saving people the time and energy of taking their cart back was such a simple thing to do and I relished every opportunity to be some poor grocery shoppers knight in shining armor at the exact right time.

Despite my flashy smile and my obvious attempt to save this lady the excruciating time and effort of returning her cart, she gave me the weirdest look. It wasn’t anger, but it definitely wasn’t a smile. It was almost a mix of confusion and indignation, but I had no idea why she would give me a look like that when I was obviously trying to help her out. I just figured she was maybe having an odd day so I shook it off and pushed my newly acquired cart inside.

I got my groceries and headed back out to the parking lot. After I unloaded everything, I steered my cart over to the cart stall that was far off to the side so no one was really around it. I wanted to do a little investigative work to figure out why the loud guy from before was doing so much fiddling with the carts. I felt like something was up and wanted to be uber prepared the next time I came.

I looked around a bit and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then I shoved my cart back in the stack and POP! A quarter came out of this little red plastic box that was attached to the handle.

Horrified, everything instantly came into crystal clear focus.

I had stolen that poor lady’s quarter!!

Turns out that in order to prevent shopping carts from being strewn all across the parking lot or taken down the street to die a lonely death in a ditch somewhere, ShopRite implements a system where in order to get a cart out of the stack you have to insert a quarter. You don’t get that quarter back until you return the cart.

WHAT IN THE WORLD?

I had never seen a system like this before in my life. I was mortified. No WONDER that lady gave me such a weird look. She was just going to get her quarter back and here I was acting all smiley and happy, basically stealing her cart right out of her hands without a care in the world. All she wanted was her quarter, but nope….not today, Cinnamon the quarter thief was there to interfere with her plans.

To this day, I still wonder about her. Does she tell the story of the super friendly lady at the grocery store who stole her cart and her quarter as often as I tell the story of how I mistakenly became a quarter thief upon moving to New Jersey?

It’s not often that you make an honest mistake that you have zero way to apologize for. Even though it was just a quarter, I did feel terrible that I couldn’t find her and tell her I wasn’t a quarter thief out on the prowl on a Tuesday afternoon, I was just a doof who didn’t know how the “system” worked!

The best part of this experience (aside from free quarter) is that I learned a very valuable lesson. When people do things that I don’t understand that might frustrate or anger me, I might actually be missing a crucial piece of information.

They might just be new to New Jersey.

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