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Money Moral Dilemma: Should we have kept quiet about bureau de change blunder?
Former_MSE_Darryl
Posts: 210 Forumite
This week's dilemma:
My wife went to a high street shop to get £400 of US dollars for our forthcoming trip. The exchange rate worked out to $660, which wasn’t great. But when she returned home, my wife realised the travel agent had given her euros, €660 to be precise, which works out as about £510. My wife felt bad, and went four miles back to the shop where the assistant made her feel like it was her error. I said we should have kept quiet. What should we have done?
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My wife went to a high street shop to get £400 of US dollars for our forthcoming trip. The exchange rate worked out to $660, which wasn’t great. But when she returned home, my wife realised the travel agent had given her euros, €660 to be precise, which works out as about £510. My wife felt bad, and went four miles back to the shop where the assistant made her feel like it was her error. I said we should have kept quiet. What should we have done?
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Comments
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Really thought this was going to be "should we go back, or just exchange the Euros back to Sterling?". Kinda disappointed
Presumably you still needed the Dollars, because you haven't said whether or not the Euros were exchanged.
It depends what the reciept said. If the receipt says 660 dollars, and you have 660 Euros, that's obviously the cashier's error. I see no point in being devious when there has been an obvious error that could maybe even be traced if I had paid by card, perhaps. I would have returned asap with the cash, the receipt, a smile, and explained the cashier's error, and stayed until I had an exchange for the currency I had paid for. In this case, your wife being made to feel like it was her error is a customer service issue, not a moral or money one.
If the receipt said Euros, I'd still stand my ground because there must be ways they can check their currency levels, a bit like querying whether you paid with a tenner or twenty when you think your change is wrong and they need to check the till. Might be wrong though.
Either way the money should have been counted out in front of your wife - if it was, perhaps she should have paid a little more attention, the notes are obviously different.0 -
I can't see how this is classed as a dilemma as you have already went back to the shop. If it was me I don't think I would have went back though lol but that maybe says more about me!0
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Me thinks the shop assistant need further training and was probably shocked when your wife was honest enough to go back and sort out the mistake.
xx0 -
Of course you should have gone back - it's just basic honesty!
Would you have kept quiet if the error had NOT been in your favour?
I think not.
I hope this is just a hypothetical situationEarly retired - 18th December 2014
If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough0 -
Similar thing happened to me. Lassie in the bank got flustered and counted me out £50s instead of £10s.
Didn't realise myself until I got home. I took it back and a few days later got a thank you letter from the bank telling me they bunged £25 in my account to thank me for my honesty.
I reckoned £25 with a clear conscience was better than a few hundred with a cloudy conscience.0 -
Your conscience is clear and you can sleep easy at night.0
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If I was the assistant I would have been grateful, as I work with money and currency and if there is any loss I have to pay it back.:(0
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Something like this happened to me a couple of years ago. I used to use a (now defunct) online money transfer service called VoiceCash to transfer GBP to EUR. One time I noticed that the exchange rate (about 1.55) looked more like the GBP/USD rate at the time (although it wasn't exactly the same). I gave them a call, and the person on their end confirmed that this was the GBP/EUR rate and didn't see anything odd about it. So I made a test transaction, and it went through at that rate, and the money came through a couple of days later. Of course, by the time I'd confirmed the transaction the rate had gone back to what it should have been.
It's not quite the same as this dilemma though - the rate may have been entered erroneously, but it was the quoted rate for the currencies I'd asked for, and it had been confirmed over the telephone.Let's settle this like gentlemen: armed with heavy sticks
On a rotating plate, with spikes like Flash Gordon
And you're Peter Duncan; I gave you fair warning0 -
It really isn't nice at all to be wrongly accused, especially when you're going out of your way to be helpful! The assistant got 2 things wrong (-2 to them!), whereas you only did something very right (+1 to you!). Don't ever let someone else's mistakes & rudeness put you off doing the right thing!0
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This dilemma has been done to death many times on this forum, and the overall general consensus is normally that most people will return to a small independent store to give back excess change/money that's been given in error, but not return to a large chain store. Or in this instance, if the customer thinks there's a chance the cashier might get in to trouble or have to pay back the error from their own pocket they'd return the money.0
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