The other day I had my first customer try to pull a fast one on the store. And by fast one I don’t mean your basic “I live in New Hampshire so I don’t have to pay tax” scam or your “I bought more than one item so I should get, like, a thousand dollars off, right?” scam. This black guy comes in and I greet him. He looks pretty well to do and I ask him if there is anything I can help him with. He says that he’s looking at the 321 but he wants to look around first. OK, that’s cool. I let him. He then makes a very quick trip around the store where he pretty much looks at every price sign in the room and then comes back to me asking me about the Acoustic Wave. “Can I hear this?” Sure you can, sir. “Wow, that sounds great. I can hook it up to a TV, right? I’ll take it.”

[Just to give you some insider information here, the Acoustic Wave box is much smaller and lighter than the 321 box, but is also much more expensive (1,079 to 899). Both are items you could carry out of the store yourself, although it is a whole lot easier to carry the Acoustic Wave.]

I took the Acoustic Wave up to the cash wrap for the guy, but then asked him if he wanted to look at the 321 at all, since that was what he came in to look at. Nope, he insisted he had a small apartment and this was all he needed. OK, fine. Don’t argue with how stupid the customer is.

So I scan everything in and he hands me his credit card. First of all, this card has an expiration date for 2007, and yet the card looks all beat to hell. Anything with an expiration date that far into the future has to be a new card. Next I swipe the card to scan it. Nothing. No beep, no resistance even as I pass the card through. I’m not sure, but the black swipe bar even looks bigger than it is suppose to to me. So I manually type in the credit card number. Then we have to put in that little three-digit CVV number you have on the back of your card where you sign your name. There is absolutely nothing on the back. You can’t even tell if there were numbers there once that just got smeared. It’s just blank, and the whole back looks rubbed to hell. Of course his signature looks brand new though. I tell him I can’t use the card without the CVV #.

If this happened to most people, they would probably curse. Most have a second card, so they would start rummaging through their wallet. You’d get excuses, “try the card again”, blah blah blah. This guy just took his card back and said, “I’ll go get my wife’s card,” and walked out the door.

We never saw him again to pick up his Acoustic Wave.