What's wrong with this picture?

Saturday afternoon, at the grocery check-out line. The cashier rings up my vegetables, juice... He gets to my oatmeal and looks perplexed. He enters the barcode, nothing. Tries to manually type the name of the product, nothing. However, this is because he continually misspells the item: marpel broun suger oaatmel.

After about five minutes of this, he simply looks up: "I'm sorry madam but this is not in our system. You cannot buy this."

"What?!" I am completely incredulous. I point to the price tag on top of the box. Rs 240.

"It's 240 rupees."

"It's not in our system."

"But it's 240 rupees."

"But it's not in our system."

I see we're not getting anywhere on this.

"Please ring up the total and I'll just add 240 rupees."

"Sorry, not possible."

Now I'm getting irritated.

"What do you mean it's not possible?! This is an item your store is selling, yet now you're refusing to sell it to me."

"It's not in the system."

"That's because you're not spelling it correctly."

I read out the spelling of maple brown sugar oatmeal. I even type it out for him. But he's right. It's not in the system.

Smiling smugly, he points to the blank screen.

"I know it is not in your system, but I will give you the 240 rupees."

"Hold on."

He leaves to presumably find his manager. By now the line has grown to ten customers, strangely none of whom are growing impatient by this now ten-minute transaction (or lack thereof). They all think I'm nuts.

Finally, the cashier comes back. He enters a code in the computer.

"That will be 240 rupees."

Unbelievable.

I know someday I might miss this. But hard to picture.