Traverse City Record-Eagle

Kathy Gibbons: Northern Living

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April 10, 2010

Kathy Gibbons: Simple is in eye of beholder

You know how "Seinfeld" was the little TV show about nothing?

Today's column is kind of like that.

Several mornings a week, I drive through the same fast food place for a Diet Coke. I don't drink coffee and blame it on a Pavlovian response to smelling my dad's coffee and getting carsick as a kid in the family station wagon. Inevitably, I'd throw up into a potato chip bag hastily thrown in front of my face by my mother, though I still like potato chips.

Anyway, it's always $1.90. Sometimes I pay with two $1 bills. Other times I count my change, getting it together between the speaker and the window. I never count change if it's going to delay someone, whether it's the customer behind me or employee at the register.

But I like hanging on to my dollars and spending my change when I have it. And sometimes, all I have is change, which, since I know how much it's going to be, works.

So I drive through early on a Saturday morning. It's a different voice from the weekday one. She tells me, "That will be exactly $2."

Darn, I think. Their prices went up. I put the 90 cents back in the cupholder and rummage for another dollar.

At the window, I hand the young woman my two bucks and say, "So, the prices went up?"

"Oh, no," she says brightly. "It's $1.90. I just tell people $2 because it's easier."

I look at her.

She holds up a dime, like she's a housewife demonstrating a nifty new toilet brush in a 1950s TV commercial, and says with a knowing smile, "This is just simpler. If I tell people $1.90, they rummage for the change."

I look at her some more.

"Really, it's simpler this way," she says.

I accept the dime, thank her and drive away.

It's silly, but it bugs me. Maybe I'm out of step, I think. Maybe I'm crossing over into the "In my day ..." phase, as in "In my day, clerks charged you what the price was. Now they tell you the amount that's simpler." But I'm not convinced, imagining a restaurant or department store rounding the bill off to the next highest dollar to avoid bothersome customers scrounging for change.

A few days later, I'm at another outlet of the same chain. It's early in the morning, there's no one behind me, and the woman at the window is friendly and sharp. So I tell her the "it's simpler" story.

"That's sketchy," she says in response. "Yes, it's simpler -- simpler for her."

It made me feel better. Although I still wonder: The next time someone tells me the price is $1.90, can I just pay a buck?

It's simpler.

Kathy Gibbons can be reached at gibbonskath@yahoo.com.

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