Lol @ being a puss that pays the bill and doesn't tell the wife he paid the bill. Grow a nutsack. Unless she's like a 15 and you are a 2 or she's bagging 3x the household income and you're a lazy ****, then tell her what the ****s up.

Heh. I do get along with officers fine, never had an unpleasant encounter.

OP,
As I'm sure you've discerned by now, the correct answer to this dilemma is hugely dependent on your location and circumstances, no one can really give meaningful advice without this information.

I'm slightly undecided on this. It seems really tacky for a mega-corp to hound people over $27 for a mistake the store made and ask to go look up your credit card statements to verify. I've got better stuff to do with my Sunday evenings than spend 15 minutes on the phone and do bookkeeping to make sure your $27 error doesn't put a dent in your $75 billion of sales. It's also annoying to me, because I doubt the store's record keeping has them investigate to the same degree when they accidentally overcharge a customer. I think it's far more fair for retail stores to take the stance that anything they accidentally give away or too greatly discount they should write off to counter-balance all the times they double charge you or don't give you the sale price you were supposed to get from the posted price. I also think it's pretty annoying for a business to be able to do this at all. When I leave a retail store, I expect to be done. If I went to a clothing store, bought some jeans, I don't want a call a week later that they rang up something wrong and instead of the jeans costing $20 it actually cost $30, and for me to give them authorization to charge more. If you can't get it right the first time, oh well, be more careful next time or train your employees better, that's not my problem. That's not an appropriate way to treat a customer. My personal time is my time. I don't want to deal with businesses and bookkeeping during my free time unless I have to/want to. Despite it being tacky and annoying, I'd probably begrudgingly look stuff up and pay. If they were being a dick to me though, I'd strongly consider just being a dick back and not paying. FWIW, if I noticed it in the store, I would speak up. I just don't want to be bothered later.

These are different, IMO. Businesses survive by providing good customer service and a good product at a fair price. Not fixing a coupon/charge error is bad customer service. Hounding people on the weekends to do bookkeeping to fix a tiny error caused by the business is bad customer service. Part of customer service is eating the costs of some small errors in order to not annoy people or make people happy. If the shoe was on the other foot, I would state my case, accept that this store has a hardass policy, be annoyed, but wouldn't press too hard. Their policy is their policy and their entitled to it. I simply would stop shopping there or drastically reduce my shopping there in favor of a store that had a more customer-friendly policy.

They are probably calling you for this because someone is taking the blame for it. I can almost see the "**** it it's a big rich corporation" angle, but I'd pay and feel good about the fact that I've saved a cashier from being disciplined or sacked over an honest mistake.