learning new things everyday

Today I made a trip to Sam's Club to return unused concessions that we didn't need at the corn maze. I had 32 items on my flatbed cart. When I got to the returns counter, the assistant asked for my club card and the receipts from which the sales were originally made. I gave them to her and she started going through the receipts to pick out the items on the list. I thought this was a waste of time because she could just scan everything, but I played the part of the nearly patient customer.

Once she finished with that, she started ringing things up. She would scan down the receipt until she'd found something she had marked earlier and then she'd key in the item number and click enter for the number of returns of that particular item. Well after a couple items, she made a mistake and keyed in Diet Pepsi instead of Dr. Pepper. (It was an easy mistake, I guess - the receipt said Dt Pep and I guess Dt could stand for Doctor instead of Dr.)

So then she had to void out the return with the assistance of a manager and start all over again. At that point, I asked if it would be more helpful if I lifted things off of the flatbed so she could scan them. She said no, that wasn't necessary because she was "quantitating". Huh?

I didn't really have a response to that, so I let her continue with her method. When she was all done, we went over everything again and I told her there should be 32 items listed. She let me count the items on the return receipt and I only got 26. I said we had missed something. She said it was all there, that she'd "quantitated" and punched in 6 cases of water at one time instead of individually entering them as she'd done all the others.

Well I thought there was no such word as "quantitate". I looked it up online and found the following definition:

To measure the quantity of, esp. with high accuracy and including measurement
uncertainty, as in quantitative analysis

I stand corrected. The definition sounds a little high-fallutin' for what went on at Sam's today, but apparently we were quantitating!