Shaw’s’ Hidden Policy

Just when you thought that Staples was the only bad company (actually I have discussed others here), I now introduce Shaw’s to the bad company crowd.

 

For those of you who don’t know what Shaw’s is, it is a grocery store chain located in the New England/New York area. Up to a few months ago, the chain was owned by the Supervalu chain of stores, but now is independent.  Apparently independence has not done the chain well as I describe here.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the local Shaw’s store where I was purchasing 8 dental products, which each of them had a 55 cent off coupon on the package.  After I scanned all the items at the self-serve register, I started scanning my coupons from the packages.  Everything was fine for the first 4 items so I continued scanning the remaining coupons.

 

After I finished scanning all 8 coupons, it required management approval for some reason.  So when the woman supervisor scanned her employee card, I noticed that the register only doubled the value of the first 4 coupons and not the last 4.

 

The woman supervisor told me that it was policy that there was a limit of 4 coupons to be doubled.  When I asked where it was stated, she either did not hear me or ignored my question.  As she started taking the items off the receipt to void the transaction, the other coupons started doubling themselves over the limit of the 4.

 

Being irritated over the whole thing, the woman supervisor told me to go to a “regular checkout with my items” and she threw my coupons back at me as if I was to be blamed for the system not to work the way it should.

 

So off I went to the regular checkout grudgingly.  I decided to checkout as 2 transactions my 8 products to eliminate any possible problem.  The first transaction went fine, however the second one stopped me in my tracks as my credit card was not accepted because the same amount was in 2 consecutive transactions.  I have used my card many times at other places with same amount consecutive transactions with absolutely no problem whatsoever.  This is apparently a Shaw’s’s problem and not a credit card issue.  After a couple of minutes, the transaction did go through but this embarrassment could have been avoided if the registers were programmed correctly.  To insult to injury to all this was that the cashier was sort of rude to me while doing my transaction.  This is true of many of the cashiers who work at Shaw’s being rude.  This is why I use self-serve registers and recommend anybody with any intelligence to use self-serve when available.

 

Overall, I was very dissatisfied with my experience this particular day.  I filled out a survey on their website expressing my displeasure with how things went.  Thankfully, unlike Best Buy, I never received an email asking me to respond to them with either a phone call or an email.  Apparently Shaw’s does respect the privacy of their customers unlike companies like Best Buy and Staples.

 

What is the takeaway from all of this?

 

First, the woman supervisor was extremely rude to me unjustifiably.  She tried to create policy where no existed.  Nowhere is there a coupon limit posted in store or located (easily) on their website.  Therefore, the policy really does not exist.

 

I saw this type of event happen many times over the years at Staples.  However, unlike Shaw’s, the supervisor was NEVER rude to the customer despite sometimes not satisfying the customer.  As far as I am concerned, this woman supervisor should be terminated.  Shaw’s is no position anymore to lose customers or have people like me making postings like this explaining how bad the customer is treated.

 

Shaw’s like Staples is desperate to keep customers, but creating hidden policies that don’t exist is no way to retain customers.  Hopefully, Shaw’s unlike Staples will correct their problems and unhide their policies and post them where all can see them.

 

This is a lesson that both companies could learn from.

 

When Store Policy and Morals Clash

 

A little over a week ago, I got a post in my Facebook newsfeed that caught my interest. The posting dealt with a customer at Walmart who was short of funds and the cashier used her own personal charge card to pay the roughly $8 remaining balance for the customer.

What was so interesting about this post is that many people said “God Bless” this employee or “Kudos to the employee”. However, there were people like me who were realists that stated that the employee would get fired immediately for her actions. Ironically, it was only a small handful of people, including myself, who threw the gasoline on this good deed.

But as they say, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”. This must have been stated by a head of a retail company because many times moral values clash with store policy. Most stores have the policy that employees cannot carry any money or charge cards on the sales floor. If they did they would be reprimanded accordingly including up to termination.

However, over my 20+ years in retail, I saw this sort of thing happen 3 times. There were some major similarities in all 3 instances:

• All 3 were done by females.
• All 3 were in some sort of management position.
• All 3 regretted their decision after performing the action even going as far as saying “Don’t ever do what I just did”.

Ironically, 2 of these were done at Staples and those women were more nervous than the one who performed the action at Woolworth. Maybe it’s because Staples has no morals and doesn’t care about the customer.

What this brings me to is that over the nearly 13 years I worked at Staples, I performed several things that I felt were morally justified even though they went against Staples store policy. I always believe that if something is in the best interest of oneself or a customer then it should be done. Simply put, store policies should be a guideline, but common sense and good judgment (and good morals) should triumph in every case no exceptions ever.

 

The Cash Register (Friend or Foe?)

Yes, the title may sound funny, but realistically this item brings real fear into many who go anywhere near it.  The funny part is that in some ways it should be feared as I will be explaining in the next couple of posts. 

At the heart of many cash registers is a computer, not a sophisticated one but still a computer of sorts.  Sometimes it does what you want and sometimes it does what it wants no matter what you do.

Way back in the days of Woolworths, our old cash registers were NCR branded machines.  These machines were simple devices with multiple keys for different functions.  When first using the register, you had to put in your employee number, which was a matter of typing in the numbers then hitting the NO SALE key.  However, sometimes, the cashiers (I am also guilty of doing this on occasion too) got stupid and forgot to input their number and just hit the NO SALE key instead.  By doing this, the cash drawer opened and one always hoped that nobody except the on-duty manager saw you do it.  It was surprisingly that we were NEVER robbed because accessing the register would be so easy.  Any register not on the front end of the store was handled by a department person and they were given a register key to unlock the register when needed to use it.  Again, it was important that the register was locked when someone walked away from the register.

The biggest issue with these registers was that it was extremely easy to make errors with this system.  Amongst the problems include under ringing, over-ringing, and even not ringing up merchandise at all.  While the third item can happen under any system, the first two could easily be avoided if care was taken.  And that is the big IF.  Many employees over the years were terminated because of the other two ways and sometimes it wasn’t even intentional.

The normal register key put the register into REG mode.  However, there were other keys that would put the register into other modes.  The X mode was when a reading on the register was to be taken or to put change in the drawer.  The Y mode was used by managers to do a cash pickup when the screen indicated that there was a limit.  It was shown on the screen as a half an 8 on the far left side of the screen.  The bad thing about this is that the symbol could also be seen on the customer’s side of the LCD display and which means that a customer would know when the drawer is loaded with money.  Again, how we never got robbed really surprised me!  The Z mode was used at the end of the week to clear out the weekly sales numbers and get tallies for the various departments being counted for the week.  This was dangerous if this was done by accident and yes it was done many times and it makes weekly tallies that much harder to calculate.

The register keyboard also featured the standard TAXABLE and NON-TAXABLE keys as well as 10 special keys used to track weekly sales.  During a sales week, a sticker was placed on the front of the display that listed what each of the special function keys were used for.  For example, a popular use was “25% off Toys”. and “25% off Watches”.  After typing in the dollar amount, the cashier would hit either TAXABLE, NON-TAXABLE, or one of the special keys.  The special keys would automatically do the price reduction from the price input.  There was no scanner on these registers and EVERY single item in the store had to be individually priced.  Guess who spent hours pricing stuff?  ME!!  Later, I will discuss pricing and inventory control.

This approach lasted for about 7 years until we received a new toy: brand new registers and modern ones at that.  These new registers were manufactured by IBM and the manuals consisted of about 200 pages of how-to usage.  I was the first person to read the manual one afternoon cover-to-cover.  Mostly skimming over a lot of the information as it was repeated over and over.  Above anything else, these registers had scanners, which simplified the entire process of inventory control.  Now, merchandise could be checked to see if it in stock in almost a real-time manner by going into the office computer.  However, only managers could do this and because it was only updated daily it wasn’t always accurate, but it was closer than wasting time looking for nothing. 

The new registers featured a two-line LCD display of about 12 characters and when the display wasn’t in use it would scroll “Thank You for Shopping at Woolworth” or whatever was programmed into the main office computer.  The confusion of keys such as TAXABLE, NON-TAXABLE, and function keys were all eliminated by these new registers.  It was like heaven.

I do believe that these new registers was a huge plus to the company, but inevitably led to its eventual downfall because ways that employees could rip off the company no longer worked and huge inventory discrepancies were no longer the norm.  It was only about 2 years later that the company started shutting down stores.  Coincidence, I highly doubt it.

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I don’t really remember much about the registers from HQ except that the scanner cord was about 15 feet long and could easily strangle an employee if not careful.  Seven weeks of employment really didn’t allow me to remember much of those registers except for how dirty they were, but then again the whole place was always dusty and dirty.  Maybe it was all that dirt that clogged my mind about my memory of their systems

Of course, nothing could compare to Staples registers, which leads to the next topic.

Up Next:  The Evolution and De-Evolution of the Staples’ Register System