I’m more with this. Neither HD or Lowe’s has any customer help any more, at least not around here. CAn’t find an orange apron to save my life, except behind some counter at the entry/exit.
I don’t know if this is meant to encourage business or what the thinking behind it is, but thing I hate: ambiguous menus in food places. There are some places that have much more available than their menu says, or their menu says all that’s available but doesn’t list the price. If I’m wandering around downtown looking for a cheap bite to eat, and I have no idea what stuff costs at your place, I’m going to go elsewhere.
I’m growing less and less patient with my Kroger store. The only reason I still go there is because I’ve been going to this store for 20 years and have grown fond of some of the long time employees.
The management however, sucks.
They’ve instructed their cashiers and baggers to separate cold items, pantry items, and chemicals into different bags. Looks good on paper but what winds up happening is instead of putting all my groceries that could easily fit into one bag, I now have three, because ya’ know since butter was my only cold item that day, it clearly needs its own bag.
Also, management has let solicitors run wild in their store. I’m not talking about the food vendors either. I talking about people trying to sell me newspaper subscriptions, gym memberships and photoshoots.
“Welcome to Moes!”
I can’t stand the constant stream of welcome messages at some fast food places.
I also don’t go to Ikea, because they are set up to make you walk through the entire store just to get one item.
I feel bad for people that have never been to Chipotle (at least mine) especially if they’re shy. My sister would be too intimidated to ever go back. If they’re not too busy I’ve practically finished ordering before I’ve made it up to the counter. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. They say “HI!!” when I walk in the door and they know that I’ll want a Fajita bowl with brown rice to go by the time I’m up to the glass. Sometime I just want to see ‘slooooow down, maybe I’ll try something else today’. I mean, they only have like 4 things, but I don’t even have time to think and my normal order just comes out of my mouth.
For me, this is minor, but like I said, a shy person that’s going in for the first time and doesn’t know the menu, I could see them not going back. It’s pretty fast paced.
Only if you’re not familiar with the place. In the two I’ve seen, you can come in through the out-door, so to speak, and walk straight into the ‘warehouse’ area, find a kiosk, and look up the bin where your furniture piece is stored. Past that is the section with all the kitchenware and the like. The other floors also have numerous “shortcuts” through them. You do have to be familiar with the layout - or at least grab one of the little paper maps they give you and then pay close attention - but you can get where you’re going with minimal obstacles.
I was in a restaurant a few weeks ago and observed this:
The Tuesday special is all you can eat wings for $12.99 (which is the regular price for one plate).
Two women came in with some groupon (or similar) discount for 1/2 off. They were told that they could not use the 1/2 off for the special.
It made no sense to me why a 50% off coupon couldn’t be used for one fixed-price item, just because it was the special, or because it was “all you can eat.” If I were that customer, I would have felt lied to by the business.
It’s possible the Groupon said it couldn’t be used with another special (you said this was the Tuesday Special).
Missed the edit window:
Groupon’s are tough. The restaurant actually takes in about a 25% of the face value plus they take out credit card fees. So if the Groupon says $25 at [restaurant] for $12.50. The restaurant will collect about $6. They’re basically considered a total loss and you write the whole thing off as advertising and hope to get some new customers from it.
I can understand them not wanting a customer to use it for an all you can eat special. They’ll actually end up losing money on it.
ETA, I don’t know what the Groupon was for, but a $13 meal at a restaurant cost the restaurant about $3.75 to $4.00 in actual food (not counting overhead or labor). So figure the restaurant was probably going to actually collect about $3 and serve at least $5.00-$10.00 of food plus labor.
That’s how bagging’s been done since the beginning of time.
You could tell them beforehand just to put it all in one bag. I bet they would. You don’t lose control over the transaction when you put your items on the belt.
…And that’s always how Groupon has been. That’s why I don’t use Groupon, because I always end up screwing myself out of a discount (in that instance I would have stayed and paid the full price then my coupon would have expired before I went again).
Limited release items - Kickstarter exclusives, preorder exclusives, arbitrarily limited production runs, etc. The more hoops you expect me to jump through to buy your product, the more I’d prefer you went out of business so there was room for another, less obnoxious manufacturer.
Regarding the bags: A while back, I started noticing the incredible amount of bags I’d get at Target. I’d have 20 items and walk out of the store with 7 or 8 bags. I finally asked and they told me that they can’t put food and non-food items in the same bag. Seems fair. Next time I was there, I paid attention. Here’s the problem. Pop-tarts, into a bag. Windex, new bag. Bleach, into the bag. T-shirt, new bag. (3 bags now). Bread…new bag…4 bags now. Keep in mind that box of Pop tarts is all by itself in one bag.
That was years ago, nowadays they still keep things separated, but they’ll go back to the earlier bags to combine them.
And back to the topic. If I go to a website and the first thing it does is ask me for my email address, I’ll leave. If harvesting my address is more important then the product, I’m not interested. I think some websites are just straight up fronts to harvest email addresses, but I do think some just have bad programmers or people that don’t realize how many people that’s going to drive away.
I’ve seen bank offices in Spain where the majority of the signs are in Chinese, with only a few in Spanish or the other local language. OK, so they cater mainly to Chinese immigrants, but if you’re not one they won’t kick you out.
But yesterday I saw, in a non-Basque-speaking area, a bank office where every single sign was in Basque. 
Maybe only marginally related, but what the hell.
There’s a pizza place near my house. When we first moved in, we were trying the local cuisine. Some was good, some was not. The pizza place I’m talking about was pretty terrible. So, the first time we ate there was also the last time we ate there. They always seemed pretty empty when I drove by, so apparently we weren’t the only people with that opinion.
A week or so ago, I noticed that the sign over the business had changed, and the interior looked different from the street (a lightinterior as opposed to the previous dark interior). “Huh, they finally went out of business” I thought. So I went to try the new place.
Nope, not out of business - they just changed the sign and slapped a new coat of paint on the inside. Did the terrible pizza - the reason nobody wants to go there - change? Nope, still awful pizza. Still bad service. Still almost nobody in the restaurant during the lunch rush.
The other thing the place does, and I really am glad I wasn’t there when this was happening, is they’ll get a local singer with a guitar, give him a way too big amp, and have him croon at the outdoor patio. I have actually seen people at the table get up and move farther away. I don’t get how business owners can’t understand that live music only brings people to your restaurant if the music is good.
That hasn’t been my experience. Chemicals maybe, but not everything else.
But that’s true regardless of which item you purchase, right? The restaurant will be collecting $3 on a $13 meal no matter which $13 it is; the Groupon is basically a cash coupon from the customer perspective. From this customer’s perspective, anyway 
Really? There’s some Groupon policy that states “not to be used with specials.”? That sucks! If that’s the case, that’s a business policy that discourages business / does more harm than good!
Since working as a store cashier in a store that doesn’t take AmEx, I’ve found out that some people who “never leave home without it” also never leave home with anything else. The corker was ringing up a sale at 11:00 p.m. and, 30 minutes and $288 later, finding out the person only had her AmEx card.
I’ve been told it’s illegal not to take AmEx. Yeah, right. Go to the cops and complain about it.
I stopped going to Canadian Tire for YEARS after one incident when I was in college (2000 or so). I had just moved into a new apartment and was looking for household-y things but had to wait until payday to buy. I walked through the store on my lunch hour with my backpack that was packed full of textbooks (honestly, I couldn’t fit anything in there if I wanted to shoplift.) Their store policy was that bags had to be left at the customer service counter. Well, since I was walking through the store and out the back door, I wasn’t leaving my bag at the front. I got to the back cash and they had a gate where the clerk had to buzz you out. Long story short, the clerk pretty much accused me of shoplifting because I didn’t leave my bag at the front and she said that if she ever saw me in there again she would call the manager and he would have me charged with trespassing. I wrote an angry letter to corporate (and included my cut-up store credit card) asking since when is “window shopping” illegal but never heard anything back.
They’ve since changed their policy about bags and no longer have the gates at the doors.
Uh, no. A merchant can take any payment they choose to take, and if they don’t sign up with Amex directly or a payment processor that handles it, there’s no “law” that says they have to take Amex cards.
If they ARE signed up, it’s possible there are some consumer laws somewhere that give the customer the right to insist on the payment form. However, a nominal Amex merchant that refuses to take the card or disses it as in the above posts is likely to catch some serious violation-of-agreement shit from Amex itself.
If you want to open a jewelry store that takes only cash, Bitcoin and Diner’s Club, you’re welcome to, and refuse all other forms of payment.
But in that case it was for an all you can eat meal. So the restaurant would be collecting $3 for as much food as the customer could eat.