Honesty in the Small Things

At the grocery store on Sunday our bill came to $114.07. My husband gave the cashier, a young fellow who looked new at his job, $115.00. The cashier rang in $150.00 and was going to give my husband back $35!! I'm half paying attention to my husband saying, "no, I only gave you $115...you owe me like $1.30." So the cashier says, "oh yea, that didn't seem right" and gives my husband $1.30 back.

As we're walking out, I ask how much the bill was total. Hubby says he thinks the bill was $114.70. And that the cashier was going to give us $35 back if he (hubby) hadn't said something. I said that if our bill was $114.70 then we should have only got .30 cents back, not $1.30. Husband thought for a minute and was aghast! We had just pilfered $1 from that confused cashiers till. So he turned around and went back and gave that dollar back. He said the cashier realized he had given us a dollar extra too and was thankful to have that dollar back.

Are you following the math here? Our change should have been .93 cents. That's all. Very easy to count back if you know how to count change back. Or are paying attention to the dollars and cents. But neither my husband nor the cashier were paying close attention. So we got $1.30 back and gave back $1.00, loosing .37 cents in the process.

Am I upset by that? No. In this case the moral of the story is about honesty and not about the lost change. Regardless that hubby had the wrong amounts in his head he took that dollar back, thinking it was the honest thing to do. Our children will grow up with honesty in the small things as the standard they see. And that may make all the difference.