A Circle K customer said an AI-powered self-checkout screen showed an $8.5 billion donation to American Red Cross while they were trying to buy a hot dog. The customer said, “I just wanted a hot dog,” after the bill appeared on the kiosk.
The onscreen receipt also listed several flavors of Gatorades, and the virtual total offered payment by card or cash. The post about the incident spread quickly on Reddit, then was deleted and resurfaced elsewhere.
Circle K self-checkout kiosks
Circle K recently rolled out AI-powered self-checkout kiosks in Canada. The kiosks reportedly identify and ring up multiple items automatically without the use of barcodes, and Forbes reported that they allow customers to check out eight times faster than the regular version.
That setup is what makes the screenshot notable: the screen did not just add a charge, it appeared to assign a donation line to charity inside the purchase flow. For a shopper, that means the issue can arise before payment is completed, while the item list and total are still changing on screen.
Reddit post and replies
One Reddit user wrote, “Would you like to round up to the nearest billion for charity?” Another wrote, “My daily transaction limit is $2B,” and a third joked that the original poster was a “broke ass”.
One commenter suggested that someone may have put a phone number into the donation screen rather than the membership screen. Another wrote, “this looks like it could be an area code and number,” which introduces a different reading of the screenshot: a user-input mistake rather than a machine inventing the amount on its own.
AI errors and checkout screens
The incident landed in a wider discussion about AI systems producing wrong answers, including separate criticism that Google’s AI-generated search results are generating millions of incorrect answers per hour. In this case, the practical question for shoppers is narrower and more immediate: whether the $8.5 billion line came from a software error, or from a number entered into the wrong field.
Circle K had been reached out to for comment, but no outcome was included in the available account. The deleted post and the competing explanation in the comments leave the screen itself as the strongest record of what happened at self-checkout.
