Fifth Avenue Illusion

[25.12.13] @ la kings

rawr xD

audio below

[26.03.28] vs. vancouver canucks

WOO!

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I've scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, "Um," from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We're just... in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn't even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don't like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she's not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just... dumbfounded. She's not even mad. I'm not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There's a bit of laughter, but it's mostly just... confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she's not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

"What... did you do?"

"I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea."

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn't scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, "I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price."

And that's when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn't take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don't. But I swear to God it happened.

8/21/2010

So surprisingly, there are still some honest people in the world. Worked this morning, opened the service desk, about 8:30 I get a lady in line looking very puzzled by her receipt with a massive cart full of groceries. I judge at first glance and think "Goddammit, what is this stupid bitch going to complain about?", because 99.9% of those people just can't read signs and feel that bitching about that will get them something. It generally does, but not with me, because I am a hardass. So I'm prepared to shoot this bitch down, and then she walks up and says to me "I think I only paid for two of my pops?"

This was not surprising, because I'd seen her standing in our absolute worst cashier (at 8:30 AM, anyway)'s line, and I wouldn't put it past her to seriously scan 2 pops when there were like 10 in the cart. So I take the receipt from the lady, and what I see is a HUGE MESS of garbled receipt display, which is a lot of stating prices, the prices things were, and then free items. Now, we had 7-Up products today that were buy two/get three free for six packs, and this is what she had in the cart. When we have that sale, the register generally rings up the two at $3.98, and three at $0.00, and it's limit one sale per transaction. That's easy to see and decipher when that works. That was not what I saw on this receipt.

I saw the two at $3.98 just fine. Underneath that was the deposit price listed, which was 10 @ $.60, so she had ten six packs on this order, which automatically meant that she should've paid full price for 5 of those. Except not. The next pops listed on the order were 3 separate $0.00s, which was fine, the sale worked in that case. And the next five that rang up rang up at $3.98 like I said they should. Only that underneath ALL FIVE it said "FREE ITEM - $3.98".

. . .

She had purchased two six packs and received EIGHT for free. At this point *I* am studying the receipt looking exactly like this lady did when she came up, and I could not make sense of this. The original sale is ALWAYS programmed using what we call a "method five", which means the sale won't ring up without all 5 products scanned. The "free item" removal is a complete different code, that we call "CM", which is custom Meijer promotion. THESE TWO THINGS DO NOT GO TOGETHER. Method five is programmed to send everything free after the purchase requirements are met, so in this case the two pops at $3.98. CM is programmed to "attack" a UPC and change the price after the requirements have been met. So, if you're following at home:

Method Five, rings up two six packs of pop at $3.98, followed by three at $0.00.

Five more six packs are scanned onto the order.

CM then recognizes that the right UPCs are on the order (it does not however recognize that some are priced at ZERO), and for some god unknown reason it "attacks" THE REMAINING FIVE AND MAKES THEM ALL FREE, because CM was OBVIOUSLY programmed wrong. I still don't quite get that part, but really, when some idiot programs these things together, is anything supposed to make sense?

So I call Michelle in our Systems department to come look at this, and much like me she just stares at the receipt in amazement, and says basically everything I just explained, method 5 and CM together, CM programmed wrong, etc. So we decide to examine what actually happened here, so we take one of the pops and scan it ten times, and see everything unfold like I explained. Then Michelle says "well let's try another set and see what happens", so we scan five more, and the first one STILL COMES UP FREE, followed by the next 2 ringing at a price, and the next two after THAT ringing up free. SO we scan in another five, and ALL OF THOSE RING UP FREE TOO. So really, in the end, you buy 2, you get 9 free. You buy 2 more you get another 7 free. After THAT many on one order, THE SALE WORKED PROPERLY for the next five.

Michelle and I cannot believe this, so we call support and they DON'T GET IT. THEY ARE THE ONES THAT PROGRAM THIS SHIT, and Michelle and I, LOWLY PEONS AT STORE LEVEL have to explain the promo coding to them and tell them that "Oh HEY, your entire chain of 300 stores? PEOPLE COULD GET SIXTEEN POPS FOR FREE IF THEY PAY FOR 4." We basically had to lay it out there before they finally UNDERSTOOD and had an "OMFG!" moment. So they say they'll send in an "emergency fix", and say it should clear up soon. Michelle tells them that she knows how to fix it at OUR store, and they tell her "No, you'll just have to wait for the fix to roll out".

When I was getting ready to leave at 3:15, the fix was STILL NOT OUT. So anyone that was in all honesty "dumb" enough to ring up 2 sets of this sale on one order got the entire second set for free. And if they rang up 3 sets on one order, which god knows people DO, all hell breaks loose and I BARELY understand what happens then. I probably don't even have my numbers right in this ramble, but REALLY. The moral of the story is, WHO DO THESE PEOPLE FUCK TO STAY EMPLOYED? W.T.F.

So those of us that KNEW about this issue (We were not allowed to tell ANYONE other than the group of us who figured it out), the riddle of the day: How many corporate Meijer employees does it take to properly code a sale? Obviously the same number that it took to once send the ENTIRE STORE 50% off.

Bryan Rust and a cat from @animalrescuelg

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

[25.12.23] @ edmonton oilers

"his shorts are off, he wants an omelette—johnny~beecher~" - beezer in the tunnel

another nate sighting 🥰

[25.11.05] vs. columbus blue jackets