Joys of modern living (and working)

This morning I went to Wal-Mart to get my oil changed. That went pretty well, filters didn't need changing and so on.

The problem came when I tried to check out. The bill rang up fine, they took my credit card, it printed out one copy of the bill and then ... pfft. It refused to print out my copy of the receipt. Two employees and a supervisor spent about ten minutes trying to get this problem resolved. Finally the supervisor gave me a receipt that she initialed in case there were ever any reason for me to need it, like needing to come back with a complaint, I suppose.

This was a nuisance to me, but I didn't have anywhere I absolutely had to be at that time. So it only cost me ten minutes. But for them, it was a much bigger problem. And not just because that register was frozen and could not be used. They had other registers back there.

The problem was -- and I recognized this from my days at Kohl's -- that the employee who had been on the register with my bill was now frozen out of the rest of the system. She could not go to another register and help someone else because the system thought she had not signed out of the register that was frozen. In order to make sure that registers are not left open and unattended, she had to sign out before she could log onto another one. So until they get that resolved, she can do other things -- help customers locate things, answer questions and so on -- but she cannot do the main thing she is there to do: enter jobs into the computer and then check people out when the work is done. She was not a happy camper. Nor were the five people standing in line while all this was going on, as it dawned on them that their day might not go as smoothly as they had hoped, at least not this part of it.

I am sure there is a way around this, because you know it happens from time to time. But it reminded me of a time back in the 1970s when I was charging something at a Target using a Penney's card, which you could do at the time. Since I was charging it for the monastery, it was sales tax exempt. No one knew how to do that. They shut down the entire checkout line in order to call downtown. It was five after five and downtown was closed. I offered to just pay the tax -- I am sure it was less than a dollar on that particular purchase -- but they insisted that they would take care of it. So I was stuck there for fifteen minutes, the poor cashier was stuck there, other customers had to go to other crowded lanes ...

You just know there's a better way. One thing I liked about Kohl's was that they had a customer service motto of "Yes, we can." That meant that even lowly cashiers could make reasonable adjustments without having to call supervisors for every little thing, that when lines had more than three people in them, other cashiers were called to open registers, that customers were treated well and not made to suffer because of glitches in the store's systems. It was a good thing, and one thing that made it a pleasant place to work as well as to shop.