Returning the Cancer Sticks

A regular customer came in the other day and wanted to return three packs of cigarettes.

"I'm trying to help my wife quit smoking and she went out and bought these here last night, so I'd like to return them," he told us.

Normally we don't return cigarettes because we can't tell where the hell someone bought them and how old they are, but he was a regular customer so we said sure.

My sister walked up to the front counter with the cigarettes to do the return. She scanned the cigarettes into the register and they didn't scan. Since he claimed his wife bought them here, that was strange that they weren't scanning.

Upon closer inspection of these Marlboro Lights cigarettes, she noticed that they had a picture on them displaying some kind of warning.

I had heard that they were going to start putting out cigarettes with warning pictures on them showing what smoking can do to you, but I thought they had outlawed that for the time being.

Anyways, they kind of looked like this:



So my sister turns to him and asks, "Where did you get these?" She had noticed that on the side of the pack it said "Not for sale." I have no idea what that means, since we've never seen that before on a pack of smokes.

"Here. My wife bought them last night," he said, starting to get agitated. The once friendly face was now becoming mean and ugly.

"No she didn't," my sister said. "They don't sell these kind of cigarettes around here."

"So I can't return them?" he said, his face getting beat red.

"No, if you didn't buy them here, you can't return them here."

"Fuck this store. I'm not coming here anymore," he said and grabbed the cigarettes off the counter as he stormed out the door.

What pisses me off about this is that this customer comes in multiple times a day and is trying to scam us. When I did a Google search on these types of cigarettes with the scary packaging, it looked like these are only sold in other countries right now.

Just because you are a regular customer doesn't mean we will return whatever you want us to return. Go back to Singapore or wherever you got these things and get your money back there. Or better yet, people are always trying to buy single cigarettes right outside of our front door, so just stand out there for awhile and sell them that way.