Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for November 10, 2016

Once, while I was working as a clerk in a local department store, one of the other clerks had a customer (a small family actually) who wanted to buy a plastic utility room sink that we carried. We had so few sales on those sinks that they were stocked in the back room on a tall shelf and he had to get the 2 boxes for the sink down by getting a fork lift driver to get them down for him. After he took the first box out and he came back to get the second box I asked him if he’d checked the price on the box because the price of the sink had gone up and I wasn’t sure if anyone had physically changed the price of the box since it was so far out of reach. He ran out and checked the price on the first box and discovered that it still had the old price and he came back and asked me what he should do, he didn’t want to change the price in front of the customer and get them mad at him, but he didn’t want to get in trouble for selling the sink for $5 less than he was suppose to. I told him to take the price gun and go out and explain the situation to the customers, if they told him to go ahead and correct the price that was fine, and if they demanded the the price that was on the box that was fine. If he was honest about the situationhe wouldn’t get in trouble either way because the mismarked box was an accident and not intentional. He thought I was crazy but he went ahead and did it, and he was shocked when the customer told him to go ahead and correct the price, because they’d expected the higher price and didn’t feel right taking advantage of an accident like that. My policy has always been, if you’re honest about something than no one can blame you for an accident.