Blue Jeans
“Hey Mom!” Jodi yelled from her bedroom.
“What is it?” Mom asked, as she was in the kitchen preparing Jodi’s breakfast.
“I’m not wearing these jeans!” Jodi protested, holding them up so her mother could see them. “They are full of holes!”
“They are supposed to be,” Mom said. “Now, get them on. You’re going to be late for school.”
“And why not!” Jodi threw her new pair of jeans into a heap on her bedroom floor.
“It was nice of Aunt Krissy to buy those jeans for me,” said Jodi to herself. “But she sure doesn’t have much taste. Imagine buying a pair of jeans that have holes in them already!”
Jodi searched through her dresser drawers and found a different pair of jeans to wear.
“Last year Mom wouldn’t have dared send me to school with holes in my knees,” Jodi continued to herself. “Now, she wants me to wear them! I’ll never understand parents!”
Jodi hurried down the stairs with the new jeans in her arms.
“Mom,” she said. “I don’t like these jeans that Aunt Krissy bought me. Can you see if she could take them back to the store and exchange them?”
“Oh Jodi!” Mom exclaimed angrily. “Since when does a seven-year-old tell her parents what she will or will not wear! Aunt Krissy will be heartbroken if I have to ask her to exchange them. Besides, I bet your best friend, Tracy, has a pair just like these!”
“Mom, please,” begged Jodi. “I don’t like them!”
“Alright,” said Mom, reluctantly. “I’ll see what I can do.”
As soon as Jodi had left the house to go to school, Mom called Aunt Krissy on the telephone. There was no answer.
“She has probably left for work,” Mom said aloud. “Maybe I’ll just go downtown and see if I can exchange them myself.”
Mom went into the large department store that Krissy usually shops in.
“Do you sell this brand of jeans?” Mom asked the sales clerk as she took the jeans out of the bag.
“Yes,” the clerk said, as she recognized the label on the jeans immediately. “We sell them exclusively here.”
“Well,” said Mom. “I’d like to exchange them.”
“Do you have the sales receipt?” the sales clerk asked.
“No,” said Mom. “I don’t.”
“Without the receipt,” the clerk said. “I cannot exchange them.”
“But,” Mom argued. “You said yourself that these jeans are sold exclusively here.”
“I’m sorry,” the clerk said. “That is our policy. A sales receipt must accompany each return or exchange.”
All afternoon, Mom worried about how she was going to tell Jodi that she couldn’t exchange the jeans. Jodi came home from school, put her coat on the back of the kitchen chair, and ran up to her room.
“My jeans!” she cried, running back down the stairs. “Mom, where are my jeans?”
“I’m sorry, baby,” Mom said sadly. “I couldn’t exchange them for you.”
“Oh good!” exclaimed Jodi. “I want them now. Tracy does have a pair of them but, Billy, a boy in my class, says that he just loves those kinds of jeans. He says that they are really cool!”
Moral of this Story:
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