As for the rest of it, this is something we will have to hash out in a different forum.

I didnt have the money to pay for the copies that day, so say I had said oh I’m sorry I dont have the cash because I didn’t notice that you had a seperate row listing double sided copies at the bottom of the price list, I, fool that I am, just looked at the price for normal old copies, silly me. Then what would have happened? The copies were made, the service rendered. I walk away head hung low sans copies and they keep the papers and throw them away. That doesn’t make any sense either. I’m not sure there was any “winning” solution in that situation.

And I wouldn’t write your comments off as sounding like “my mother”–why write off intelligent criticism and communication as “motherly” as if being motherly or being critical were negative things? The only thing that reminds me of a parent in the comment is the fact that I don’t think you trusted that I have thought about things like this, and that my actions are based on a critical and long-thought-through set of thoughts that I would gladly talk your ear off about someday in person, though not in the internet, because it’s the internet, legal reasons, etc etc.
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However, I have to be honest and say I take great issue with your swift denial that Karma was involved. “Stiffing” the copy shop back in Mulheim was not an effective way of “damning the man”–in fact, small thefts like this actually damn the “little man”–the man who, like you, is just trying to get along in the world (and, like me, wants to have a paying job in order to accomplish that). Though I have never worked retail, I am fairly certain that (in the USA, at least) workers, not store owners, are blamed for small thefts like a load of photocopying that wasn’t paid for. In fact, in the restaurant industry for example, the server is almost ALWAYS liable for any missing monies. So stiffing a server or even a worker in a small copy shop probably penalizes that worker and not the faceless corporations you are trying to undermine.

So, though I am not your mother and certainly not trying to sound like the ethics police (though that’s exactly how this is sounding), please think carefully about whom you are actually harming when you flout the rules.