Scammer, or just dim?

[Dreamstalker]

So I was down at the local coffee joint yesterday morning (not SB, starts with a P) visiting with the employees and obtaining my usual sugary caffeinated goodness when I witnessed the following.

After grilling the counter jockey about various aspects of "how does this work" (I don't recall the exact conversation, but it had to do with the freebie cards they give out every so often and was fairly long and confuzzling), an old woman ordered a pound of coffee, and tried to pay for it with one of the reloadable store cards. The card wouldn't scan and the manager had to be summoned. That happens at times, sometimes the "older" designs of cards will no longer scan in the store (even though they work online) or the scanner just decides to take a nap.

What had happened was that she just grabbed one of the empty cards off of the display and tried to pay with it. I'm not sure if she was actually trying a scam (not smart, as all the people in line saw her take the card off the rack) or somehow thought that the stack of cards in plain view already had money on them.

Weird. Then when her pound of coffee had been ground and the cashier asked her if she wanted it she ignored everyone.

[Broomjockey]

Well, my instinct says dim scammer, but there might not be scamming, it might have been a case of "That one doesn't work, I'll take this one as a replacement! Now, lemme use my card!" But either way, there's some serious dumbness going on there.

[Dreamstalker]

The first card she was asking about trying to use was a paper "free drink" business-card-like thing that they give out as an apology for an unusually long wait, as a thankyou for filling out a customer survey, etc. That one says very clearly on it "any size drink". Ground coffee or beans are not mentioned anywhere.

Dunno, maybe she thought that since you used the ground coffee to eventually make a drink, it counted as a drink

[Becks]

I don't know the answer.

I think I'll go with "too stupid to be out in public unsupervised".

[Dreamstalker]

Yeah, this town does tend to harbor a lot of those...

As a friend of my mom's who comes in from Newton every so often says: "There are so many weird people here."

Heh, maybe that's why the bf refuses to come visit me...afraid he'll get sucked in by the weirdness.