It’s always funny when customers try to blame the cashier for their own mistakes.

So, what would you do if someone didn’t count their change before leaving the store, and then came back accusing you of stealing from them, even though they had spent money somewhere else? Would you just give them the amount they wanted? Or would you call someone to see what you should do?

In the following story, one cashier opts for the latter, but the customer calls the police. Here’s how it all went down.

What’s the best way to deal with missing change? Call the cops on the cashier!

I was the assistant manager at a discount shoe store, and on this day, I was working at the checkout when a woman came up and was talking on her phone.

I asked her the standard checkout questions and told her her total. This happened years ago, but I think the total was roughly $22.

She handed me $40 cash, and I handed her the change, $18. She took her stuff and left, and never hung up the phone, and never counted her change.

She tried to tell the woman that they’d figure it out.

She went shopping at a big-box superstore next door. There she spent the change I gave her.

Then she came back to my store and accused me of screwing up her change. She kept holding her receipts up and adding them together, and kept repeating she’s $5 short.

Keep in mind, she did not count her change- she shoved the cash in her purse and left the store, and spent more money somewhere else. The money could have fallen out of her purse on the walk over to the superstore, or the other cashier could have screwed up. There are a lot of variables in the situation.

After she talked to me like an idiot, I maintained my cool and advised her that we would figure it out, and reminded her to be patient.

To avoid issues, she called the store’s customer service center.

I called our store’s customer service center to see what they would advise us to do in this situation. The thing is, this was a small store and only had 1 register.

According to the corporate rep I spoke with, I needed to take the customer’s information and close the register at the end of the night as usual because we could not close a register during business hours.

If the cash count was OVER by $5, then I did screw up the change, and we would call her in the morning to come and pick up her money.

The woman started accusing her of stealing the money.

Well, according to this woman, I was stealing from her if I didn’t give her the $5.

I repeated that this is the corporate policy, and I had no control.

So she did what any good Karen would do and called the cops.

At this point, she sat in the corner and was making more phone calls, swearing about the theft of a cashier. All the while I had to keep checking out customers, gotta love being short staffed.

The cop took the cashier’s side.

So the cops show up, and she rambles on about how I stole her $5, and she is just waiving her receipts around like that is concrete evidence….

The cop looks her right in the eye and says in a matter-of-fact tone,” Why didn’t you count your change?”

This obviously wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted me to leave there in handcuffs.

By this point, tears are streaming down my face, and the cop comes to talk to me. I told him what corporate said, and he told me to follow their direction. He took the basic information he needed and left. But he was on my side and gave his contact info.

The woman reluctantly gave me her information to call her in the morning, and she and the cop left the store.

As it turns out, the drawer was actually short.

So we close the store that night, and I count the cash at least 10x….and guess what? We were $20 SHORT. (Another issue is we had an employee who we suspected of stealing, and every shift she worked, exactly $20 went missing, as I said, there are a lot of variables here.)

Since $20 was missing, I knew I had indeed given her the correct change.

This Karen was going to have to suck it up and admit she lost her own money. But I wanted my manager to recount the cash and be the one to call her the next morning- like she would have believed me anyway.

She took the news badly and filed a corporate complaint. Luckily, we had calls and police documents to back everything up.

There were no ramifications for me. It was an awful, stressful night, but hey- at least I got a good story out of it.

Eek! It’s easy to see both sides of this, but the lady should’ve counted it.

Let’s check out how the fine folks over at Reddit would handle it.

This person’s workplace accounts for these situations.

This is a great way to prove it.

What a nice girl!

This reader went through something similar.

What an annoying situation! There’s nothing worse than being accused of something you didn’t do.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a cashier who gave her phone number to be friendly to a guest, but immediately wished she could take it back.