For the savvy, retailer's liberal policy offers many happy returns

We underestimate the poor. They are savvy. While Minnesota legislators grapple with funding General Assistance Medical Care, a state program providing health insurance to low-income Minnesotans, the poor know this indisputable fact: Health care is free.

Show up at the emergency room, and you get treatment -- on somebody else's dime. The concern about who pays for it is just meaningless static.

The first few weeks of a new year is a boom time for the poor, especially those with children. I work as a cashier at a discount department store on St. Paul's East Side (yes, that store -- the one with the big red concentric circles). Our retail sales, usually anemic during January and February, spike due to large purchases paid for with debit cards issued by tax-service firms in anticipation of tax refunds.

For many poor, child tax credits -- worth into the thousands of dollars -- dwarf any income they may have earned the prior year, or the cash and food benefits they may receive monthly from an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card.

A fellow $8-an-hour cashier -- a single mother and beneficiary of tax credits -- recently looked with disdain at a young pregnant woman and her four children. She turned to me and, with the efficiency of a tax accountant, calculated the tax credits, exemptions and deductions this mother would earn.

The poor are entrepreneurial; some resort to lying and cheating.

I frequently process returns at the service desk. The store has a liberal return policy. Have a receipt dated within 90 days, or the credit or debit card used to purchase an item? No matter the reason for the return, nor the condition of the product, your money will be refunded. Some, knowingly I suspect, use the system to essentially rent a product -- for free.

One gentleman returned a battered steam cleaner he'd purchased days before. His rugs clean, he had no further use for it.

Recently, a woman returned a premium $300 child car seat she had bought -- with cash -- 20 minutes earlier at the St. Paul Midway store. The store was alerted that it might have accepted counterfeit bills.

One resourceful customer spent hundreds of dollars on low-cost soaps, lotions and medicines -- all with coupons -- and then returned them for a full refund, pocketing in cash or credit the coupon savings.

Some "shoppers" with initiative will look for discarded receipts, walk into the store, find the item listed on the receipt, then walk it over to the service desk for a refund.

In accord with a practice not explicitly stated, the store will allow a customer to return an item -- without a receipt -- using a driver's license. The customer can receive up to $70 annually in store credit for this receipt-less return. It's meant to be a convenience, but the entrepreneurial poor have gamed the policy.

Two teen girls stopped at the service desk with a bag full of expensive anti-aging skin care products. I asked if they had a receipt. They said no. I said that as young as they are, they didn't seem like candidates for anti-aging serums. They said their "auntie" had given them the high-end Olay products.

Before I could explain the no-receipt return policy, they had produced their driver's licenses and told me to split the store credit refund between the two of them.

I looked one of them in the eye. You shoplifted this stuff, didn't you, I wanted to say. She returned my glare, smiled, and in my imagination said: Yes, and there's nothing you can do about it.

After I'd processed many of these obviously fraudulent refunds over a period of months, my outrage softened, and I began to admire the moral certitude of the Olay girls and their ilk.

I am the working poor, too, and with my hours reduced and other job prospects narrow, I wondered: Is this the opportunity I had hoped would be knocking at my door? These are merely recession-proof venal offenses compared to the mortal sins of the Bernie Madoffs of our world.

But perhaps due to my Catholic upbringing and the hard-wired part of my brain that screams "wrong, wrong, wrong," I just can't cross that moral threshold. I could not be at peace. But I wish I had that entrepreneurial moxie.

For many of my poor clients, every trip to the store is an opportunity for a Happy Return.

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Doug Champeau is a cashier and writer from St. Paul.

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