The falling down of humanity

Doug and I went to Sam's today and bought a ton of stuff - literally. A ton of peppermints, a ton of Cascade, a ton of chicken, and a ton of dog food. So we thought. We expected the damage to be roughly $90. When the cashier told us it would be $61, we looked at her like she was nuts.
"Did you miss something...?" I kind of trailed off. She was busy handing my card back and hurrying the next customer through the line. At Sam's, they love to check your receipt to make sure that you didn't sneak anything in your basket in the 4 feet that lie between the cashier and the door. "She'll catch it at the door and we'll get it taken care of." Doug nodded. Of course she would.

The woman took my receipt and obviously pretended to take a quick inventory of my cart. It shouldn't be too hard - 7 items on the list, 8 in the cart. She drew her little line down the middle of the receipt and hurried us out the door. We got about 4 feet into the parking lot and I turned around. I just couldn't do it. Jesus said that what you do to the least of him, you have done to him. I couldn't steal dog food from Jesus. The little diddy I learned to help me remember the notes on the scale was "Even God Buys Dog Food," and so will Sheri.

I told the lady at the door what had happened. She jerked the receipt from my hand, "Let me see that." She was ungrateful, disgruntled, even angry. The other door-checker ripped it from her hands. "It's right here - Nutrigain, $10." I sighed, "Nutrigrain is granola. This is dog food." She was obviously put-off. "Go right there to customer service. They'll help you."

We stood in line at customer service. I peered over the counter at the lady who was wandering around, not working, and told her what had happened. I wanted to know whether we were in the right place. We were, and she was annoyed as well. The lead back there came over. "You know, you really ought to be more appreciative when your customers help you guys out like this." She assured me that they did appreciate it - they sure have a funny way of showing it. Three people were pissy to me for wanting to pay for my merchandise. Three people thought less of me for doing the right thing.

The lead offered us anything we wanted from the café, but we declined. We had just eaten, but thank you just the same. A mere thank you would have made me feel better.
On the way out the door, the first put-off list-checker muttered, "It's just dog food." Yeah - I wanted to say - $22 of dog food. Three hours of your pay for standing here not doing your job. Just dog food that I wanted to ante up on. I wanted to lay into her and set her straight, but I walked away, pretending not to hear.

How can it be that we live in a world that is so wrought with people taking advantage, demanding more for less, and being generally crummy people that we don't know how to behave when someone does something nice for us? How is it that morality has slipped so far that we can't recognize a good deed when one walks right up to us and speaks to us directly ?
Our morals are slipping further and further down the spiral and the only thing we know to do is to let it happen and walk away quietly with the dog food we didn't pay for.