Feeling deprived lately, are you?
By what? A lack of assholes? :dubious:
Certainly not as long as you’re around.
I have no intention with arguing with you. You’re a troll. I’ll go back to the other threads I’m frequenting and argue with the assholes who honestly disbelieve me. It’s more fun.
Oh, I see, something from some other thread. I take it that you didn’t get a chance to “prove” your point where ever that is? So sorry.
(So, is this threadshitting or is he trolling? I can never tell)
It’s romantic to think about the overwhelmed cash-only customer making their Luddite protests against modern society by demanding he get preferential treatment over other customers, but the fact is, it’s 2009 and not 1950. The days of the white uniformed gas station attendants coming up to your car with a smile and pumping your gas, washing your windshield, and changing a buck 50 for your full tank are a thing of the past.
Most transactions are done via credit card in our society. Frankly, I can’t understand why anyone with a credit card wouldn’t use the prepay option on a self-serve pump. That’s fine if Mr. Asshole refuses to use a credit card, or can’t get one, but if that’s the case, then he must concede that he WILL stand in line with the rest of the dummies.
Me, I call it intelligent marketing and customer service. You’re free to disagree, O entitled one.
It’s intelligent marketing and customer service to hire more staff than you need and pass the cost on to the customer? :dubious:
As for entitled, I’m perfectly willing to stand in line to buy gas - apparently, you aren’t.
I point again to the QuikTrip model: they never have less than four employees on the floor, and frequently will have six or more during rush hours. I haven’t looked at any applications lately, but IIRC their starting wage is $1 or 2 above minimum. They have something like four registers and I usually see two or three open. They paid for better POS systems that allow each cashier to handle two transactions at once. In order to pay for this extravagance, their gas has something like a 10 cents/gallon premium over the rock bottom price in town. I admit I don’t know how paying for gas with cash works, because I only use plastic at their well-maintained pumps.
Despite all that, they still wind up with lines in the store every so often, because people love them for their speed, cleanliness, and quality of product (they have the best soda fountain I’ve ever seen in a convenience store). I pulled in to grab a soda and some breakfast this morning, and even though they have something like 20 parking spots beyond the actual gas pumps, I was lucky to even find one at the ass end of the lot. You better believe they make their money back on staffing.
ETA: Granted, they’re not so much a gas station as a convenience store that sells gas. Their model focuses on getting you to buy crap in the store as much as getting you to buy gas. Course, AIUI, that’s how most stations operate these days: they deal with a razor-thin margin on gas and try to make up for it in chips and soda.
“More staff than you need”? Where did you get that from what I posted. Or the idea that I was unwilling to wait in line.
Or are you, as usual, trying to pick a fight and make yet another thread about curlcoat? So far you’ve hijacked three about issues I found interesting into being about you. Sorry, this is my last post here in response to you. But this one at least needed making to highlight your underhanded way of twisting other people’s words.
Oddly, and as a retail drone, I agree with curlcoat. Staffing is usually, and ought to be, determined by sales, not customer preference. Lines are inevitable; that’s why they offer the alternative pay-at-the-pump convenience. If you don’t want to stand in line, pay at the pump. If you choose to pay cash or need to go in to buy cigarettes or snacks, you may have to wait in line. Even when staffing dictates so many employees, unexpected rushes are going to happen anyway. That said, there is probably room for improvement at some chains. If you don’t like the way a particular chain staffs, there are plenty of others out there to choose from, isn’t there?
Also, from an hourly worker point-of-view, four hour shifts suck balls.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think **curlcoat **has a point here. Polycarp, I can see where you’re coming from, but not all of the changes are necessarily going to result in increased revenue, and even if they do in the long term, it’s a scary first step for a business to take, and one that may be hard to justify to investors if it backfires.
Once I was waiting in line to pay…and it was long. The cashier caved and helped 2 people that butted in line…so I took that as permission to leave. I kept waiting for the police or at least a phone call about not paying for the gas, but it never came.
I generally love the convenience of pay at the pump.
The only thing that gives me somewhat of a pause was that, at one point, we in Toronto evidently had a rash of fraud artists who were somehow using the pay at the pump system to steal credit card information.
I only suspect this because I twice had my credit card cancelled by the bank as part of their internal fraud investigation - while they didn’t tell me why, the only places I had used the card was in gas stations at pay at the pump. (In neither case was I actually defrauded). I heard anecdotally that widespread fraudsters abusing the system was the reason (not from the bank, they didn’t tell me anything other than that some sort of fraud was suspected - not who or where).
Hopefully this problem has been addressed by whoever installs the system and whatever weakness the fraudsters were exploiting has been rectified.
Because two people butted in line it is now okay to steal? I don’t see that as following logically.
To make my point clear, I do not believe that when I (or any customer) enters a store, there should be a clerk at a register free to accommodate me. Waiting in line for one, two, or three customers to be accommodated ahead of me is perfectly fine (if mildly frustrating; it’s part and parcel of a world that ceased revolving around me when I turned three).
My view is that if you have one clerk on duty and a long line (say eight or more people waiting on line), you are likely to lose customers who are unwilling to wait. On the presumption that this is not a coincidental ‘spike’ in what is otherwise a steady trickle of customers, adding a clerk will (a) process sales faster, resulting in happier customers, (b) enable the non-checkout duties to be performed, resulting in a more attractive, better stocked store, and © over a few weeks result in increased sales, as people irritated at the lines at the competing store come to yours, where they can find their merchandise, pay for it, and be on their way without inordinate waits. As a side benefit, it also gives you as store owner/manager/regional manager employees with better morale, more inclined to have a positive work attitude both for the ltitle things you need to have done and in pleasantness to customers. It’s a matter of degree, not of kind – a short line is a necessary inconvenience, a long one an exercise in frustration that demonstrates that the store does not care about customers nor employees, but only in the sacred bottom line. And while they’re entitled to turn a profit at customer and employee expense, nothing says that I’m obliged to contribute to their pelf.
Well, clearly BD’s money wasn’t as important as that from the people who cut in line, so the cashier wouldn’t miss it.
IIRC from reading about a scam like this, it was accomplished by putting another card reader over or inside the normal one, which then scanned the card as it was inserted.
By the way, line jumpers can be justified under a few circumstances: For example, if old, semi-retired Dr. Carlisle down the road shows up while I’m waiting to pay and says there was a bad accident and he’s been called in, along with every other physician they can reach, and needs to gas up to get to Raleigh, not a person in the world would object to him jumping the line. I’d give place to someone trying to shop on a break from work, or someone hurrying to get to work on time, since I’m on no deadline – but that’s me, and I can understand why others might feel differently.
By the way, nobody should need to wait on line to get a receipt for a pay-at-pump transaction because the at-pump receipt printer is broken. The clerk should be able to print that out with at most three keystrokes between transactions, and hand it to the customer when he/she comes in to claim it, without inconveniencing the customer(s) being waited on at the time.
I’m surprised you didn’t take it as permission to have a couple Snickers on the way out.
They had the opportunity for me to give them the payment but they treated my time as unimportant. Therefore, they can come to me for payment. I would have paid if they had. Note this has only happed twice in my life so I don’t do this everyday (leave without paying). The second time was when I went in and the line was 50+ long. No way in hell I was going to wait in such a long line. If I had seen the line before I filled I would have went somewhere else…but it was hidden from view.