Counting Pennies

I'm not a big one for the Black Friday madness, and in general the idea of shopping at Christmas time gives me the willies. This morning, I needed a new front deraileur as like a dolt, I ordered the wrong size in a grouppo and couldn't return it. Doh!

So 7 am I'm in Performance Bike, they have one without the box that they let me have at a big disocount. Thanks! Performance was having a 20% off sale, so I got some tubes and socks and stuff and gave the kid at the cash register my card, and the coupon. He rang it all up, and told me the total which seemed high. So I asked him if he took the 20% off and he said yes. The person behind me started to get checked out and out of habit I scanned the reciept. Nope, he hadn't taken the 20%, he thought the computer automatically did it.

No problem, with many apologies, he credited back my card, then re-rang everything, apologized some more, and did everything but fall on his sword. Nice kid. No worries, but looking at that reciept saved me over $27.00. To some of us schmucks, thats real money.

Dicks had a coupon to get my running shoes, today only for $59.00. There's a Dicks at the Stony Point Mall, which is DEAD. So I went in, got my shoes from a rack, and went to the front cashiers. Four cashiers. I gave the front line "manager" my shoes, and the coupon which she balled up and threw in the trash. Then she told me the charge was $72 something. I told her the shoes were $59.00 that I had the coupon. She told me thats right they rang up $69.00. ? Ok, I explained to her that I had the coupon, they were $59.00. Then we proceeded to a circular conversation until another cashier walked over, took the coupon out of the trash, and showed it to her. Then they proceeded to have a conversation as she handed me the pen to sign the reciept.

Ok, two stores, two totally different reactions. The Performance Store was a honest mistake, the kid apologized, and all is good. Dicks.. that sucks. There is a great Dispair.com poster about customer service that says something along the lines of, "if we ignore our customers long enough, maybe they'll go away." I think I"ll send a link to it to the Dicks Customer Service email address.

So this holiday season, while you are out helping out the economy, take a gander at your sales reciept in the store. I hit two stores, and had both overcharge me. That's 100% of my transactions for the day.