/lit/ - Literature

>>19254582
>Trying to return a clearly used item

The worst thing I’ve ever done?

Okay, this is far from the literal ‘worst’, but I still think back to it and feel gross.

So in 10th grade me and a few friends needed money. I can’t even recall what for…probably weed or something — No, I remember now! Chrissy Keefe got a speeding ticket, and needed to pay like $250 without her parents finding out. So we all tried to help her scrape together enough. Looking back, this actually sounds like some Ferris Bueller-level high school shenanigans.

I still have this image of us all hanging out in the mall parking lot trying to think up ways for a bunch of broke teens to come up with cash, and pretty much all the options were bad. This was in the early 2000s, so we couldn’t just do Fiverr or Craigslist or anything. To be honest, it’s probably best we didn’t have the options that kids do today…Christ.

My other friend, Amber, had the idea that we could each return some of our DVDs to Walmart - apparently that’s what her dad did because he was in too cheap to rent videos. It never crossed our minds that you could just return anything for cash, and bit-by-bit we started to make the scheme larger. We went through the mall trash cans looking for store receipts, and read through the fine-print. Some were 30-days or 90-days, some gave back cash and others were store credit, most needed a receipt.

I think I came up with the idea of using one of these trash receipts for our return. We just needed to find a receipt for an item one of us already owned. After collecting dozens of them, we found someone who bought a GameCube at a Best Buy…and Crissy’s brother had a busted GameCube in the basement we could return without anyone noticing.

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