Nine Years Ago Today: Learning experience

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 11, 2008, not a word different, but with images added.]

“Are you sorry?” I asked the young head cashier at a local home improvement store. She had just straightened out my $25 discount coupon on a purchase of over $300 for building and gardening materials. I was getting set to build a raised planting area my wife wanted in the back yard.
    Over half an hour earlier, the computer at checkout had rung up only about a $10 discount, seeming to have applied a miniscule percentage discount to each item as it was rung up. The head cashier had had to refund everything one at a time, then re-enter all the items a different way before applying a straight $25 discount, as the coupon called for. The first time she did this she didn’t seem to believe the results, so she called another cashier over and they redid the whole thing before concluding that she’d done it right the first time.
    I’d grown a bit grumpy standing around for all of this (and for three or four telephone interruptions the head cashier had handled while she was straightening out my discount), occasionally looking through the entrance doors at my 16-year-old Honda, which had six 6"x6"x8' timbers and four 2"x8" timbers tied on top and, in the trunk, six bags of top soil, four bags of mushroom compost, and two dozen 18" pieces of rebar. Plus, I was already pretty tired and would still have to come back to the store two or three times to collect thirty more bags of top soil and twenty-five bags of pea gravel that I hadn’t room for on this trip (my Honda is a passenger sedan, not a pickup truck). I expected her to tell me at the end that she was sorry for everything. But all I heard as she handed me the receipts was, “Thank you.”
    So I looked her in the eye and asked, “Are you sorry for all of the trouble I’ve been put to?”
    “Oh no,” she said, “it was a learning experience.”
    Considering this astounding obtuseness, I must have looked stunned for a moment. I told her I appreciated her helping me, she’d been put to a lot of trouble too. But could I talk to the store manager?
    She fetched a manager, and I told him what had happened and how long it had taken. I told him that the first cashier and the head cashier (who was there to hear this part) had been very good to help me, but this sort of thing shouldn’t happen in this store. I’d been a customer of the chain for twenty years. Surely they could set up their computers to handle their official coupons, and not reqire their cashiers to spend half an hour re-entering things by hand.
    The manager had been listening patiently to my account. He said he was sorry about everything, but he paused, seeming to be waiting to see where I was headed.
    “I’m really disappointed,” I said. “I’d like some satisfaction.”
    He asked me if I was planning more purchases at the store. I said I had no particular purchase in mind, but my wife and I were always coming in. After all, we were home owners. He took a small card out of his shirt pocket and asked me for my name. I told him and he wrote something on the card and handed it to me. He said I’d receive a 10% discount for a checkout made within a month. And, again, he said he was sorry about my trouble.
    I trust that the young cashier heard enough of this to learn something further from her experience. Customers whose shopping doesn’t go well need a little sympathy.

Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle