They didn't say anything, and that was worse.

It was my first Christmas in retail, when an indigenous family of about six or seven came through my register. I scanned through their items, while they ate cherries out of the bag of loose cherries they were purchasing, and spat or flicked the pits at me across my register.

I was new to the area, new to the store, and had zero confidence in standing up for myself against anyone who might cause a scene. (That changed after a couple more months in retail, but I had only been there a few weeks and wasn't done with humanity yet.)

Instead of telling them off for eating an item whose sale price relied on weight, I simply leant on the scales of my register as I scanned the cherries through. They probably only had a kilo or so, but they were charged for closer to four kilos. Cherries weren't cheap, either. They were about $12 a kilo.

Once our registers were upgraded I couldn't get away with doing that again, but I justified it with the logic that they'd probably been grazing on the cherries throughout the store anyway, so who knew how many they had actually eaten.