I Was Nearly A Walmart Ice Thief

I attempted to leave Walmart with a shopping cart full of groceries when an elderly women wearing a blue vest accosted me and demanded I show her a receipt. I handed it over grudgingly, telling her that I didn't have to show it to her and she didn't have the right to demand it.

"I'm only asking because you have ice," she said. "I need to make sure you paid for it."

"Of course I paid for it," I shot back, getting even less polite and composed than I was before, which is saying something because I was previously approximately negative 100,342 pisseroids on the pissometer. I might have even muttered something less than becoming under my breath about how nonplussed I was about the scenario, having to take a valuable 32 seconds out of my day to show her my receipt like a common ice thief.

She looked over the receipt and found that in fact I hadn't paid for it, then demurely allowed me to confirm this by handing it back. I was indeed nearly an ice thief.

I moped back to the checkout woman who had overlooked the ice and paid for it, accepting precisely five apologies from her.

And then when I left again I went to the other exit because I was afraid of once again coming into contact with the woman who so authoritatively served me. There was only a greeter at that other exit, and she was far too busy pulling out shopping carts for people to think to question my ice purchase as I walked into the existential void that is the Walmart parking lot. My thoughts involuntary turned back to the receipt checker.

I was probably the one ice thief she's caught in her 47 years on the job, and her vigilant stoppage of my near ice thievery no doubt will give her another 47 years of determinational fuel to stop and check the receipts of others who buy ice there. She is the proud lion, king of the jungle that is Walmart at Cortaro and I-10, and I am nothing more than a hyena, lurking in the shadows, desperate to evade her all-seeing gaze and furious bite of jungle justice.