Here’s part of one page of my merchant statement. A few more lines wouldn’t be a hassle.
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of Amex, but if they wanted to charge different things to the merchants for different types of cards, they certainly could. Everyone else does.
I get kind of huffy over “for your convenience” as a reason for a rule or policy. My nearest grocery store has self-checkouts, which I like, but they don’t permit alcohol sales through them for obvious reasons - no one can check ID. That’s fine, I get it. If I’m buying wine or beer I’ll have to wait in line for a checker. But the sign they’ve put up in front of the self checkout says, “For your convenience and in compliance with state law, no alcohol purchases are allowed”.
All those bozos needed to do was put the part about the law (true or not) and that would be it. This policy is most assuredly NOT for my convenience, and in fact is the exact opposite: this is LESS convenient for me. So stop with that bullshit.
While I’m on the grocery store subject, I have to agree with a previous poster about checkout lines. All I want to do is get my shit and check out; I will absolutely put it right back on the shelf if there’s a huge line and one checker. Especially if it’s right before, say, Thanksgiving. I know those pesky food-intensive holidays are VERY hard to predict, but maybe the scheduler could contact someone here on Earth to get help with that.
I’ve never gone in one for this reason.
They don’t have an employee monitoring the self-checkouts? At the stores I go to, it’s typically 1 “cashier” per 4 (8, max) self-checkouts. They need someone to be there for when something doesn’t scan or the belt goes crazy or because #9 never senses the correct weight.
I only use self-checkouts, and only buy alcohol there. At one major grocery store they never check my ID (I’m 35 but look 19). Usually they have some handheld scanner and call out “You’re good, dude!” and input whatever bypasses the ID check. At the ones that check, they usually have an employee hovering who will run up and enter the birth date on the screen in 15-30 seconds.
Re: complaints about bagging purchases. I only wish that retailers would train baggers to do logical things like putting the cold stuff together, chemicals separate from foods and fabrics, not cavalierly tossing canned goods on top of the eggs or bread or tomatoes, etc. I’m absolutely OCD about putting my items on the conveyor in groups, because I don’t want to get home and find ruined produce or raw meat juices contaminating other products. I want my cold stuff to be bagged together - if something comes up while I’m lugging the groceries in from the car, or putting them away, I want to be sure I can quickly stash the perishables and safely ignore the other bags while I see to the rest of my life. (In fact, I’m so persnickety about grocery bagging that I complimented the new guy this past week, and then sent an e-mail to corporate, praising him for being good at his job and extremely pleasant.)
Most of my other peeves about customer service policies have already been mentioned: being asked every five steps whether I need help (I’ll let you know when I do, thanks;) excessive contact after a purchase; employees who can’t answer my questions and make no effort to find an answer (I understand that every employee doesn’t know everything, but the second half of a reply of “I don’t know” is “Let me find out.”)
Other peeves: Being asked “How is everything?” a nanosecond after my food has been delivered at a restaurant, long before I’ve had a chance to sample. Telephone “hold” messages that include 2 minute loops of music, interrupted by “Your call is important to us, please stay on the line for the next available customer service representative,” back to music. For the first ten minutes, every time I hear the voice, I mentally prepare myself for talking to a person. After that, I’m usually focused on something else, and then when a real person finally reaches me, I sound like an idiot as I try to reorient myself.
The worst, though, is merchants who take “the customer is always right” as gospel: No, the customer isn’t always right. Some of them are flat-out idiots, some are scammers trying to take advantage, some are just plain bullies. If you make your employees spend 80% of their time trying to grease the squeaky (stupid, bullying, scamming) wheel, while your trouble-free clients waste their time in that ever-growing queue behind the idiots, you’re not helping. The pushy ones will be back, because their method worked last time. I may not be back, because I just don’t have the time or patience to wait in line behind some twat trying to make a minimum wage drone refund an item that clearly shouldn’t be refunded.
In anticipation of a June Provincial election, Elections Ontario is running a series of heavily airing ads referencing changes to voter ID requirements. One can assume this is on the taxpayers dime.
The ad amounts to a cartoon line drawing and some ‘don’t be worried’ assurances, finishing up with, “You probably have what you need, in your wallet!” Then directs you to their website, appropriately named, ‘wemakevotingeasy’.
However, at no point, during this commercial do they ever bother to actually tell you what you DO need!
Because, one can only assume, that would make it…what’s the word? EASY!
What kind of idiot thought this was a good idea?
Up until a few years ago I used MySpace as an avenue to find bands. You could often download songs directly from MySpace.
And then they changed it so that you could only put them in your MySpace Player or whatever, that you’d have to be online to listen to. Plus, my DSL isn’t all that fast so it would slow me down a bit even if I were online.
I’d be happy to buy music from the artists as well as free downloads, but bands I discover through MySpace are very likely to not have music available for purchase elsewhere.
So I just don’t go to MySpace, because I’m sick of being burnt by a really great sounding song that I can’t download or purchase anywhere, just listen to online in hopes that it doesn’t go away.
I hate fast-food places that give you no time or place to stand and look at the menu without holding up the line. Unfortunately, their wish to have to make a fast selection of an upsized, high-profit combo means that the menu is either an unreadable jumble, simply doesn’t list many individual items, or all that plus putting it in a place you can’t read it until you’re basically standing in front of a cashier. Even worse is the same experience in a drive-through, where the ten cars behind you don’t appreciate anything but the fastest bark of your order.
Even in a world of directed purchasing, it’s a huge pain in the ass.
Gosh. What a great deal. I wonder why the hundreds and hundreds of gold and platinum Visa/MC cards with similar qualification requirements haven’t thought of all that. :dubious:
For free.
With 2-5X more acceptance.
Within more reasonable merchant terms.
I went through that for a while regarding an extended warranty on my car. Whoever did this spent way more money trying to get me to purchase one than they would ever have made back had I actually bought one.
Here’s another thing I haven’t seen yet on this thread: FOX News on a TV, especially if it’s the kind of business that probably shouldn’t even have or need a TV in the first place. :rolleyes:
What’s your problem, dude? I was explaining why I think AmEx has more widespread appeal than you seem to think they “should”, not why I think AmEx has more widespread appeal than Visa or MC (because I wouldn’t argue that to begin with).
Visa/MC has been offering these “features” on their more-convenient, cheaper and more widely-accepted cards for decades. Scusa me for not being impressed that Amex has caught up… except that most users, the ones who don’t get their Blue card through Costco, still pay an annual fee and face the issue of Amex acceptance. The only plus I hear is that it’s a semi-useful alternate Costco card.
If Amex were to stop marketing tomorrow, it would vanish - except perhaps in some sliver market of genuine fast-travelin’ executives. Like all marketing-driven products, it’s probably not the wonder most of its buyers have been convinced it is.
This has cost my local gas station several hundred dollars worth of business. It’s actually a really good gas station – it has a comprehensive variety of coffees for $1.00/cup (iced or hot, any size), actually decent pastries, and friendly staff. And then they put in the new pumps with TV monitors and loud recorded advertisements (for the coffee, which I was going to get anyway). I found I really, really resented being bombarded with ads in this fashion. So I started buying gas elsewhere, even paying considerably more for it.
But I still stop and buy their coffee every morning. So…irony abounds.
I wish more stores had those maps. At Home Depot the other day I needed a native guide to find an item. “Just tell me where it is.” “You’ll never find it.” She was right, and after a block-long stroll through a labyrinth of short aisles and peculiar turns she had me there. Then left it up to me to find my way out.
But with there being no standard of which side of the car they put the gas cap, you often have no choice which way you go.
So you are stopping there anyway and paying more for gas elsewhere, too? My mom would call that, “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
I, too, stopped going to gas stations when they added the monitors. There is the annoyance factor from the ads to consider. Generally, I’ll pick the no-ad gas station even if it’s more expensive. To me, there is an added benefit to avoiding ads that makes it worth a higher cost.
Amazon did the same thing with their Kindle app. When I first downloaded the app, I could buy titles from within the app itself. They removed that functionality years ago. Now it’s go to the Kindle store in the browser, buy the title, select send to iPhone, open Kindle app, find the title, download to phone.
And some marketing ween is staring in disbelief at the sales figures, sputtering, “But… but… everybody watches TV!”
I had the same problem with my Hyundai dealer.
The intent is obviously nice, but I have to get an oil change every six weeks. It was ridiculous. It would have bene much better if they’d just called me once a year.
I haven’t seen monitors displaying “advertising messages” at gas stations or grocery stores in years. Perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the marketing people figured it backfired?
Count me as another who will pay an extra penny or five per gallon to avoid those. Now if we could just get rid of them in medical offices and oil-change place waiting rooms, that would be fabulous.
