Unshopping

Cowgrit likes to shop. She doesn’t necessarily buy a whole lot; she just likes the shopping activity. She also likes body care and bath stuff. So I wanted to get her a gift card for a nice body care shopping day.

I went to the local mall to find a place I know she likes and get her a gift card. The first place I went in smelled really nice. The music was really loud, and the products were completely beyond my comprehension, but the air smelled good. I told the girl working in the store that I wanted to get a gift card.

“Great,” she said, and led me to the checkout counter. “How much do you want the card for?” she asked.

I told her and she pulled out a card and began ringing it up on the cash register. There was some problem, and she tried swiping the gift card again. Something was wrong, but she tried again. I gave her my debit card, and she tried to complete the sale. My card info went through just fine, but the gift card just wasn’t registering with the system.

I stood there patiently for a couple minutes while she tried to get everything to work properly. She had to get out a notebook titled “Communications Binder” and look up a code the register was asking for. When she couldn’t find it, she called another store for advice. With the help, she got the sale to go through.

I signed the receipt for the sale and put my debit card back in my wallet. Since there had been difficulty, she wanted to swipe the gift card just to make sure it showed the amount. She swiped the card . . . and nothing. The sale had not registered on the gift card.

The clerk explained that she wanted to call another store and have them run the numbers through their computer to see if the problem with the card not showing any amount was just a problem with her computer. She called the other store, told them the gift card numbers, and learned that it didn’t show anything on their computers either. So I told her to just refund the amount back to me and I’ll try again some other time.

That wasn’t going to be easy either. She tried to refund the amount, but the computer wasn’t having any of that. Then she started taking products off the shelf beside her and ringing them up. I thought that was really odd, but I wasn’t in a hurry and I was willing to give her the benefit of accepting that she might know what she was doing. She didn’t seem ditzy or anything, so I didn’t think this whole situation was her fault. I’ve had to deal with insane computers, too.

After ringing up a few items from the shelves around her, she did a return of all those items. That was her way of giving me back my money since the computer wouldn’t register the return of the gift card. The return came to 17 cents over the amount I paid for the gift card. So, in the end, the gift card was trashed and I got my money back (plus 17 cents). She gave me the receipt for the return, and since she couldn’t give me the receipt for the gift card, I had her photocopy it so I had something to show if things turned bad. She also asked for my address so she could send me some gifts to apologize for the wasted time.

The offer of gifts is a nice touch. I wonder what we’ll get, though. So for the 15 minutes I spent trying to purchase a gift card, I got 17 cents, potentially some body care gifts, but no card.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com