Rude Store Clerk Mansplains Knife Pricing to Woman, She Gives Up, Gets a Steal of a Deal

A hasty and rude retail worker quickly corrected this woman when she pointed out a pricing error on a chef's knife she was interested in. She relented in revealing the mistake to the worker and ended up with a deal on a great knife.

This story was shared to the r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit by u/TIL_eulenspiegel, the woman in the story, where it earned 19k upvotes as of the writing of this post.

The u/TIL_eulenspiegel, the Original Poster of the topic (referred to as the "OP" in Reddit's culture), opened with some context to the situation that occurred. 

"My most-frequently-used knife was an 8-inch chef's knife, but the one I had was of such crappy quality that I dreamed of the day when I would have enough money to buy myself a Real Knife." the OP explains, "So when I eventually got my first professional job, I got my finances all straightened out and decided that it was time to make my big knife purchase."

When she went to the department store she was greeted by an "older man" who was extremely helpful. But by the time she had made her selection he had gone on break and been replaced by a "young rover from another department."

When she approached the counter with her selection the knife rang up as $40, which she was certain was incorrect. When she attempted to correct the error the youngster interrupted her. Upon inspection of the label, it was clear to the OP that the knife had been labeled incorrectly. The label described a six-inch sandwich knife when it was clearly an eight-inch chef's knife.

This marginalization is something that is extremely frustrating to experience. It often occurs when someone makes the assumption that you won't know much about a topic because of certain attributes. Usually, they are overtly patronizing or condescending. The reality in these situations is that you're more experienced in the topic than they are but they oftentimes won't pause for long enough to realize this. 

Sometimes it's an honest mistake, you launch into an explanation about something because it's a special interest of yours. Maybe you're a retail worker or it's otherwise your job to explain something to people and just default into your spiel before fully analyzing the situation and who you're talking to. 

There are various reasons why you could accidentally do this to someone with reasonable explanations. But, unfortunately, the trend is also very commonly targeted towards women with undertones of bigotry and misogyny. We refer to this as 'mansplaining'. The term is misused now and broadly misattributed but it has important lessons to teach us.

In this case, that marginalization worked in u/TIL_eulenspiegel's favor. She gave up on correcting the young man and ended up with a hell of a deal on a knife. Sounds like a win to us.

_{Thumbnail Image: Kevin Doran}