part0065

When you hear about the outrageous scams some con artists pull—and get away with—it makes you wonder how the victims can be such suckers. And yet who wouldn’t fall for the heart-wrenching ruse that’s part of the urban legend called “The Grocery Scam”:

A young man is shopping in a supermarket, when he notices that an older woman seems to be following him, staring at him in a sorrowful manner. He moves to the next aisle, trying to avoid her, but she follows, still staring.

And when he finishes shopping, he ends up behind her in a long checkout line. Her grocery basket is full to overflowing; his contains just a few items.

She keeps staring at him, sadly, making him feel most uncomfortable.

Finally, she speaks up. “You must pardon my staring,” she says, “but you see, you look exactly like my son who died just two weeks ago.”

And she begins to sniffle as she repeats her claim that the young man perfectly resembles her late, beloved son. “I mean exactly like him,” she moans.

Then, as the cashier bags her groceries at the front of the line, the woman whispers, “As a favor to a grief-stricken mother, would you mind saying ‘Good-by, Mom’ to me as I leave? Somehow it would make me feel so much better.”

The young man gulps and agrees to her pathetic request. She gives him a tearful smile, waves, and wheels out her three heavy bags.

“Good-by, Mom,” he says, waving back.

All the scene needs to make it perfect melodrama is violins welling up in the background or maybe a little supermarket Muzak. But before your heart strings are tugged too tightly, listen to how the legend ends:

The young man, reflecting on his good deed, feels such a warm glow of self-satisfaction that he barely notices the cashier ringing up his own purchases. Until, that is, the cashier tells him that the bill comes to $110.

“There must be a mistake,” the young man says, pointing at his single small bag.

“Your mother said you’d be paying for hers, too,” the cashier says.

I’ve heard this story from many sources in the United States and Canada and in dozens of different versions. Sometimes the scene is a large discount store. In some, the son is said to have been killed in an auto accident; in others, he was a soldier killed in Vietnam.

Always, though, the woman persuades the young man to call her “Mom,” then sticks him with her bill.

Although the storytellers never know the victim of this sentimental scam—it always happened to a friend of a friend—they usually know exactly what was in his shopping basket—”Just a deodorant stick and two cans of motor oil,” for instance. And they usually can report the precise amount the scam cost him.

Oddly, no one ever explains why the young man entered the same checkout line that the older woman was in, if she made him so uncomfortable. (See below for one reader’s explanation of this detail.)

In a variation of the legend, set in a restaurant, the victim buys a strange woman’s story—and dinner for two. She tells him her sad tale, cries a few crocodile tears, then convinces him to stand up and give his “mom” a great big hug.

As the woman goes out, she stops briefly at the cashier’s counter, then turns and waves one last good-by.

Not long afterward, the young man gets the bill for his meal. “Your mother’s check was added to yours, sir,” the waiter explains, “just as she asked us to do.”

Lest I become too proud of myself as a successful de-bunker of modern myths, readers sometimes send me letters that bring me down to earth with a bump. They say that in questioning the truth of some stories, I’ve completely missed the point of them.

Some stories—such as “The Grocery Scam”—contain inconsistencies that render them impossible from the start.

For this legend, Lieutenant Robert E. Wilson of the Baltimore, Maryland, Police Department’s Crime Resistance Unit wrote to comment.

I had wondered, when I heard “The Grocery Scam,” why the young man would have gone into the same checkout line that the older woman who had been staring at him was already standing in. Wouldn’t he have stayed away from her?

“Perhaps he was the other part of the ‘team,’ “ Lieutenant Wilson suggests. “The old lady and the young man could be working a scam against the store. What better way for her to get out and away than to have the young man appear to be a victim?”

It makes sense now that you explain it, Lieutenant Wilson. But it seems like an extremely complicated way to steal a mere bag of groceries. And if you are right, then this is not an urban legend after all, but an actual scam. I’ll have to think about that a little more.

Are people in Australia and Texas just pulling my leg? I began to wonder when two very similar versions of “The Grocery Scam” told as a joke came in my mail within a week. Here’s the Aussie version, sent on January 3, 1989, by folklorist David S. Hults at the Curtin University of Technology, Perth:

“A young girl was in line at a supermarket checkout counter just behind an elderly woman. The woman stared at the girl, and eventually said, ‘Please pardon my staring, but I can’t believe it. You’re the spitting image of my deceased daughter.’

“The woman then requested, ‘I know this sounds strange, but when I leave the store, could you say goodbye to me, and call me “Mom,” as a reminder of my daughter?’

“The girl, slightly embarrassed, agreed. And as the woman departed, the girl waved and said, ‘Goodbye, Mom.’

“Then the checkout clerk told her that the total bill for her groceries was $67.45, and the girl was stunned, since she was only buying a loaf of bread and some milk. ‘But your mother, who just left, said you would pay for her groceries too,’ the clerk explained.”

So far, so good. Up to this point, this is the straight urban legend. But the Down Under version concluded in a different way:

“The girl ran outside the supermarket to nab the phony mother and force her to explain and to pay for her own groceries. The girl caught up with the woman in the parking lot, just as she was getting into her car to drive off.

“The girl grabbed her leg and tried to pull her from the car. She pulled and she pulled and ….”

And, at this point the listener to the story usually asks something like, “Good grief, what happened?”

The reply: “Well, she was pulling her leg, just like I am pulling yours now.”

Aha! says the folklorist. This is a “catch tale”—one of those stories that leads up to an absurd situation, about which the listener is forced to ask. The storyteller’s reply makes a fool of the listener, so he or she is “caught.”

Another popular catch tale leads up to someone trying to steal a package that the storyteller says he just got at a butcher’s counter. Inside the package, in answer to a listener’s question, was “Baloney, just like I’m feeding you.”

The most famous catch tale of all was popular during frontier days. The storyteller claims that he was backed into a corner by fierce attackers, perhaps a band of hostile Indians.

Nobody believes catch tales, so an urban legend modified in this way is no longer a legend, but a joke. What I found remarkable was that I got the same altered “Grocery Scam” story in a letter written just five days later by Charles Wukasch of Austin, Texas.

What I suspect is that this form of the story is becoming popular and that it was simply coincidence that I heard two such far-flung examples a week apart. The only slight difference in the Texas story was that the supermarket clerk herself ran into the parking lot after the con artist. The story concluded the same way as the Australian version: “She was pulling her leg, just like I’m pulling yours.”

Wukasch, who heard the story from his brother, knew another version of the straight-scam legend as well. In this one, a soldier asks a high-ranking officer in a restaurant if he will wave back to him in order to impress the soldier’s girlfriend. After their meal, as the soldier and his girl leave the restaurant, the soldier waves, and the officer waves back. What the officer doesn’t know is that the soldier has told the cashier that the officer is paying for both their meals, and that he will wave back in order to identify himself.

Maybe this is the sort of trick that inspired the military regulation that all personnel must wear name tags.