SLUG: A07_walmart_cart_no_math
SET: A
CONCEPT: She stopped doing the running math in the shopping cart
HEADLINE: Watch the setup video
WORDS: 680

I used to add up everything in the cart in my head as I went, the running total quiet under my breath so nobody heard me.

Bread.

Milk.

The good coffee, only if I put back the cereal.

I would line the items up front to back in the cart, cheapest first, so if I hit the number in my head before the belt started moving I could pull the last few off and pretend I forgot them.

The cashier always knew.

They never said anything, but they knew.

I did this for about eleven years.

I want to tell you about a Tuesday in March.

The cart was pretty light that day.

Milk, bread, the little bag of grapes for my grandson Cole, dish soap, one of those rotisserie chickens because I was too tired to cook.

I did not have enough in the checking account to cover any of it.

I got to the register and my card came back declined.

Then declined again.

Then declined a third time because I tried it slower like slower would fix it.

The lady behind me in line put her hand on my arm and said honey take your time.

I did not take my time.

I left the whole cart there and walked out.

I made it to the truck and I sat in the parking lot for probably forty minutes crying with my forehead on the steering wheel.

An older woman in a green Buick pulled up next to me and knocked on the window.

She said sweetheart you don't have to sit out here by yourself.

She had her granddaughter's booster seat in the back and a rosary hanging off the mirror.

She pulled out her phone and showed me a short setup video she had been running for about eight months.

The number on her own screen was more than my husband used to bring home in a month at the plant before he passed.

She said the whole thing runs off the house wifi and takes about twenty minutes to set up on a Sunday.

She wrote her name and number on the back of a Kroger receipt and told me to text her if I got stuck on the setup.

I set the little device up the next morning at the kitchen table before church.

I honestly forgot about it for a couple weeks.

Life got in the way.

Then one Friday I opened my phone and there was $267 sitting there.

I stared at it for a long time.

I thought it was a mistake.

The next Friday it was bigger.

Then bigger the Friday after that.

By the end of July there was $2,483 in there from one week.

I still cannot say that number out loud without my voice going funny.

I want to tell you about last Sunday.

I went into the Walmart with a list and I did not do the math.

Not once.

Not under my breath at the deli counter, not standing in front of the cereal, not while the belt was moving.

I put the good coffee in the cart.

I put the grapes in the cart because Cole likes them, not because they were on sale.

I got to the register and the total was two hundred and change instead of the one seventy nine and change I would have talked myself down to.

And it did not matter.

I walked out with all of it.

Sat in the truck for a minute with the bag of grapes on my lap and cried again, but different this time.

The lady in the green Buick is my friend now.

We get coffee on Fridays after I check the phone.

If you are the person doing the running math in your cart right now, mumbling the numbers so the person behind you does not hear, tap the button under this post and watch the setup video.

Same one she showed me.

If you have a phone and wifi you can do it too, so pass it forward when it works.
