A & Police

The A&P a couple blocks from Columbia High School got a lot of business from students at lunch time. This was largely because of their stock of cheap pizza bagels and off brand soda. The soda, in particular, was a deal at 50 cents a can, better than many vending machines.

I can only imagine the pizza bagels were there to target our market, but despite devoting a section of his store to us, the A&P manager seemed uncomfortable with having high school kids in his supermarket. His worries set the stage for the experience of your friend and mine, Buddy.

On one particular visit, Buddy placed one of the off brand soda cans in his pocket. It’s not clear to me whether he intended to steal it or, more benignly, to use the pocket as a means of carrying the can around while deciding what else he wanted to buy. Soda cans do have a way of attracting condensation and getting slippery in your hand, after all. The world never got a chance to know, as before Buddy could approach a cash register, the manager pulled him aside and informed him that the police were on their way.

The manager’s suspicion was probably reasonable, but it’s strange to me that he’d call the police before Buddy had a chance to actually do anything illegal. That seems to weaken his case unnecessarily. He might also have accosted him and said something like “I hope you’re planning on paying for that,” as a way of getting his point across and making sure he recorded the sale without complicating the situation further. Nonetheless, he went ahead and led Buddy to an office where he could wait.

As it turns out, when the police got there, they sided with Buddy, pointing out that he hadn’t done anything to warrant the call. It turns out that they’d been frustrated before with the A&P manager for having a quick trigger finger that both the school and police department saw as unjustified. Perhaps bound by some set of rules, they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything unless Buddy had actually stolen the soda.

Notably, all this happened as the result of deep pockets and a fifty cent soda. If the pockets were deep enough to fit the can, I’d think there’d also be fifty cents in there somewhere.