Can’t compute

Are they kidding? (Photo by BobbaLew.)

I have a hard time cogitating the above sign.
My supermarket, who goes out of their way to be friendly, has posted the above gloom-and-doom sign in their container-exchange area.
The supermarket is Mighty Weggers — Wegmans supermarkets of Rochester (N.Y.)
They are as much an institution as the Post Office, or the YMCA.
They’re also an attractive supermarket, well stocked and well staffed.
They always finish well up, often on top, in the “Fortune-100 Best Places to Work.”
You don’t wait in line to be checked out. At a competing supermarket the express-line might be 20 deep.
At Wegmans there never are lines. They always have plenty of cashiers open.
And their product is pretty good — perhaps a little over-priced, but worth it.
You’re not picking through garbage.
“Yo Luke,” you might hear at another supermarket.
“Toss me that there peach so I can smash it outta the store with this here banana.”
At Weggers you never hear that.
Shopping there is pleasant.
They seem to have the same attitude I had driving bus.
That is, there may be a few rotten apples out there, but it’s more important to not lose a customer.
Driving bus I used to figure 99% of my patrons paid to correct fare.
There was no sense checking.
Our fareboxes were a disaster. I wasn’t about to turn off a good customer just because the farebox miscounted, which usually happened.
Once-in-a-while I’d get some lackey wanting to rip me off. I’d let it go. If I didn’t, I might get mugged or shot.
I’d also remember that 99% of my customers weren’t trying to rip me off.
Weggers does the same.
A while ago I purchased a quart cardboard carton of Egg-Beaters.
I holed it squeezing it into my car-cooler; it began leaking profusely.
I noticed before I left the parking-lot, so I took my leaky carton back into the Wegmans.
The service-desk happily replaced it; no snide comments, no pointed accusations, no noisy put-downs.
Even though it was my fault!
Those Egg-Beaters may have cost $3.54. It was better to lose that $3.54 than lose me as a customer.
Yet here we have this sign in the container-return area.
Really?
Prompt the container-police if I dare return a can not purchased in this state?
It was bad enough when the machines wouldn’t remit a bottle-deposit for soda-cans bought in the store.
“Can’t remit. Product not sold in our store!”
I had to pull teeth: “I bought that soda right here in this Wegmans,” I said. “You’re selling it on your soda-shelves. You might wanna look!”
Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth......
Now their machines remit for Sun-Drop cans.
Seems the whole point of a container-deposit law was to get the unsightly containers from roadside back to the store.
So some ne’er-do-well from northern PA, which doesn’t have container-deposit, tosses his empty beer-can above the state-line in New York, which has container-deposit.
Dare I exchange that can for fear of inflaming the container-police?
Crew-cut bruisers behind the walls in the exchange-area monitor my container returns.
I return the can found by the NY state-line.
Law enforcement personnel burst out and collar me.
“You in deep trouble, boy!”
Somehow this doesn’t seem like Weggers.

• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs. My stroke October 26th, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. I recovered fairly well.