Would you have been upset?

I never, ever post on Saturday nights, but I’m sort of irritated right now, and I’m curious to get my readers’ input. So, here’s my first ever Saturday evening post (boy, that has a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it??).

Today we signed all the kids up for the library club, and when you do that, you get a coupon for a free kid’s meal at Chik-Fil-A. So, we decided that we’d all just go there for dinner tonight. The kids ate completely free, plus my husband got a free milk shake (Chick-Fil-A was giving free milk shakes to dads in honor of Father’s Day).

Anyways, afterwards we decided to stop in at Goodwill (a different one than my usual Goodwill) to browse around for fun. I found a pair of Union Bay bermuda shorts that were my size and were in fairly good used condition. All the shorts at this store are marked $3.25, and I’d have been happy to pay $3.25 for this pair except for the fact that they were missing an essential button: the one above the zipper. I figured I would probably be able to scrounge one up somewhere, so I walked over to the checkout counter, explained the problem, and asked the employee if she could possibly mark them down. At my regular Goodwill, the employees are very nice about this. If there’s something wrong with the item, they’ve always been gracious enough to mark it down for me.

Not this employee. In a less-than-gracious voice she said, “No. You can buy a button anywhere.” I thought maybe she was joking, but nope, she was dead serious.

I was a little taken aback, but after ascertaining that she was indeed not going to budge, I said that I didn’t want to buy the shorts, hung them up, and walked out.

I know $3.25 isn’t a lot to pay for shorts, but the thing is, it doesn’t seem right to charge the same price for shorts that have all their buttons and for shorts that don’t. You wouldn’t expect to pay the same price for a picture frame with broken glass as you would for one with glass that was intact, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect some price lowering on a pair of shorts that is currently unwearable. I think I might have been less annoyed if she’d been nicer about it, but her manner left a lot to be desired.

I did like the shorts fairly well, so I will probably make a stop back in to that Goodwill sometime next week in hopes that the crabby employee will not be working. Or, if I happen to remember, I might stop back in on the last Saturday of the month (next Saturday) when all the clothing is 50% off.

Anyways, I’m wondering what you seasoned thrift store shoppers think about this. Maybe I’m overreacting because I’m a fairly new Goodwill shopper, and if I am, you can feel free to tell me. 😉

Edited to add: The shorts were a bit on the weathered end of things, and Iwasn’t over the moon about how they fit me. If they’d been in really good shape or had been amazingly comfy, I probably would have been more prone to buy them anyways. But, since they were kinda faded and missing a button, I felt differently.