Say Cheese!

I am an Electronics employee at Walmart and one evening I was called up to the service desk to check out a camera that was being returned. Our policy on this particular camera was “Sold as is. No refunds unless unopened or defective”.

The customers returning the camera were three young men with European accents. They had purchased the camera almost two weeks earlier and it had finger prints all over the the screens from use. While I was checking the camera out, my coworker and I listened to them talk on their cellphones about how they were on vacation in the states and would be leaving from LAX the next evening. They mentioned that they took a road trip up the coast to the Canadian Border and back and took “some neat pictures of the ocean”.

After the customer hung up his cellphone, I asked him why he was returning the camera and he said, “I just don’t need it anymore. It works fine.” I told him we could not take back the camera because it had been used and was in fine working order. He changed his story and said he had never used it. He asked his buddies to back him up, and they did.

We called our Assistant Manager over to check it out and we could not find any proof that they had in fact used the camera. They insisted that the finger prints were from me.

Just when it looked like they were going to get their way, I instantly remembered that although there was no memory card in the camera, there was a space on the internal memory to save pictures. The customer was demanding corporates number, saying he did not use the camera at all and that we (the employees) framed him and “Americans are rude.” In the middle of this I brought up the internal memory and there was a picture of him and his three buddies, clearly in a car in the dark, cheesin’ for the camera, among others.

Me: “And what is this?”
Customer: “Ummm….”
Assistant Manager: “Certainly you aren’t accusing my employees of walking out to your car with you and taking a picture of you and your friends, are you? And theres snow in the background. Did my employees manage to make it snow here in Los Angeles, too?”
Customer: “I don’t know how that got there. You did it…. how did you do it? I dislike America, very much. F*** You.”

He and his buddies grabbed the camera and took off.