SCOPE

I’ve been thinking about Grant Fairfax’s story highlighting the lengths that some people will go to in order to prove their pretentiousness and attitude to frequenting charity shops. It occurred to me that I can possibly go one better.
I was once at the counter of the Buxton branch of SCOPE waiting to pay for a Breton sweater I was buying to send to my French-hating sister for her birthday, to pay her back for sending me two pairs of socks with ‘imperfect’ stamped on them for my birthday, when the man in front of me in the queue, after paying for a pair of corduroy trousers, refused the offer of SCOPE’s own bag and promptly produced a Marks and Spencers bag and put the trousers in it. Can you credit that? I couldn’t. So, leaving my Breton sweater with the old dear behind the counter, after first warning her to guard it with her life (Or what was left of her life because she must have been well over a hundred), I followed him out of the shop. By that time he was about twenty yards down the street. I called out: “Excuse me!”
He stopped and turned. I caught up with him. He looked me up and down, puzzled. “Yes?”
“I’m a store detective with Marks and Spencer,” I said. “I have reason to believe you didn’t pay for the trousers in that bag. Could I trouble you to show me the receipt?”
The poor bugger didn’t know what to do. Several people who had been within earshot stopped to watch.
“Er…” he said, getting redder by the moment.
“Yes?” I said, with an impassiveness that would have done credit to Inspector Morse.
“I…er…didn’t get them from Marks and Spencers, I got them from the er.. charity shop,” he mumbled at last.
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” I said. “You got them from where?”
“The charity shop,” he said, a bit louder and by now quite shamefaced.
I stuck in the knife right up to the hilt. “Then why are they in a Marks and Spencer’s Bag?”
All the people who had stopped to watch, by now a dozen or more, waited for his reply.
“I…er…I…”
But he just couldn’t bring himself to admit it. He thrust the bag into my hands and walked off quickly without another word. I don’t know if he ever tried to pull the same stunt again but somehow I doubt it. And the corduroy trousers fitted me perfectly.
 

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