For all of the Wal-Mart bashing that goes on, much of it justified, I suppose, I’d like to relate a story that I witnessed at my local Wally World yesterday.
I went there yesterday at about 11:30AM for this & that. While there, I noticed that there was a line, about 40 people deep, with their grocery carts lined up at the snack bar. When I asked what was going on, an employee said that there was something weird going on with their power supply and that all of the store was powered except for the cash registers. The cash register at the snack bar was the only one working.
So I went about my shopping, figuring that the city electric utility would get the problem solved right away (after all, Wal-Mart brings in millions of dollars of sales tax revenue to this town). Well, when I headed for checkout, the registers were still closed and I noticed a somewhat angry mob of people heading for the exits. Seems the cash register at the snack bar had gone offline and thus Wal-Mart was completely unable to do any business at all.
I decided to wait things out at the snack bar (Wal-Mart is the only retailer in this town that sells Fresca, and I had nothing better to do on a Saturday morning). Amongst the complaints of a dissatisfied group of shoppers, and the pleas of the managers that this was the city’s fault and not the store’s fault, an unexpected thing happened. A woman in her 60’s, tears in her eyes, walked up to the manager with two personalized decorated cakes. They were for her grandson’s birthday, that day, and she couldn’t very well go buy them at Schnuk’s, nor could she wait all day for the power to come back on since the party was in a couple of hours. So, the manager just let her have her cakes, free of charge! She probably got about $40 worth of cake for free!
So, I send out a hearty shout-out to the manager at my local Wal-Mart for doing a completely noble act of kindness.
Heyhommy
I’m always loving a kind act, but don’t be polishing that halo just yet, after all it’s hardly like he had a shot of selling those cakes to anyone else.
A very similar thing happened to my dad a few years ago in the UK. He was waiting in line to check out and the server crashed, so nothing would scan. The store’s solution? They stopped new customers coming in and a manager supervised the checkouts.
Dad was asked “How much do you think you have in your cart” “Oh, I don’t know £40 worth?” “How about we charge you £25?” He paid up and followed many bemused but happy shoppers to the exit.
Considering I drop a minimum of $50 per visit (record - $150 - went in for only a hair dryer, got a great cookie jar and groceries, never bought the hairdryer), she got one helluva deal.
And considering they shut down the registers at midnight, and reopen the one NEXT to the one line that has 45 people waiting (“We’ll be opening THIS line in 15 minutes” [yeah, right!], and the last half of the line rushes ahead even though you’ve been waiting for an hour and they’ve been in line for ten minutes, and the manager says, “sorry, it depends on which reigster the cashier who counts out first is assigned to”, I’d say she got one helluva deal.
But yes, that was a nice thing of the manager to do. Too bad the ones around here aren’t as conscientious.
Duh … why couldn’t they run an extension cord from one of the powered wall outlets to each cash register? They probably even had extension cords for sale back in the electrical department.
Well, at my retail store, each register is more or less useless without a functioning pair of controllers (IBM towers running IBM POS software). With these servers offline, the registers don’t know how much each item costs, nor whether it is taxable. The cashier must enter the price of each item individually – this may not have been an issue in the past, but nothing is marked with a price nowadays. Furthermore, the registers are capable only of processing cash payments in this circumstance. Now, some configurations of this software permit the designation of a master register to be used as a backup for price information, but if the network connecting the registers is also down (due to the power outage affecting the router or hub), then this register would be unable to communicate with the other registers. So simply running power cords may not have solved anything. The master register is usually a low-volume register, so the snack bar register may be it. Moreover, restoring power to the network hub/router may also not have been possible, because usually the network hardware is stored behind a lock so that store management and associates can’t do anything to it without approval.
I know that when our power goes out at work, we have a generator to cover the registers and controllers, but these also fail on occasion.
The most important part of that whole thing, and I think I managed to lose it in that giant paragraph.
Even if the management had been able to restore power to the registers, they probably would not have been able to restore power to the network hub nor to the controllers. These are usually kept somewhere out of the reach of store associates to prevent any unauthorized tampering, either good or bad. Without these, the registers would have been more or less useless.
I’m no expert, but there are probably just a few more details that would have to be worked out than getting the required number of pencils and paper to the cashiers to get a gigantic retail store working without registers.
Several months ago the cash registers at our local Kmart went down for about an hour. It was around Christmas shopping time so the lines were slightly longer than usual. I decided to stick around because I didn’t really have anything better to do, and the sales assistants weren’t sure when the power would come back on - it could have been 5 minutes or it could have been 5 hours. What could have been a tedious experience was made better by someone offering me the latest Vogue to read, and several cashiers opening up bags of lollies to pass around. They were also holding items for people who wanted to do some other shopping.
No free items for me unfortunately (unless you count reading the Vogue) but it was a nice retail experience anyway.
You should really get out more. In case you haven’t noticed, item’s prices are not marked with a little price sticker anymore. Cash registers work off the scanned bar code (which also tracks inventory). Math skills, or lack thereof, have nothing to do with it.
On top of that, selling items without going through the POS would totally bork the store’s inventory which would lead to many wasted hours and lost sales down the road.
Several years ago when my mother passed away, my dad and I traveled to a different state for her burial. He forgot to bring his blood pressure medication, but I knew he filled his prescriptions at Wall-Mart, so I took him to the local Wall-mart pharmacy and asked the pharmacist to contact the Wal-Mart pharmacy at home to get his prescription filled. Unfortunately, his prescription had no renewals on it so we couldn’t buy any more. After I explained the problem in detail to the pharmacist, he asked how many days of meds my dad needed, and then just gave us the pills for no charge. When I asked if I could write the store manager and praise the pharmacist for his kindness, he asked me please not to since it would probably get him in trouble!
The only noble things I ever heard of my local Wal*Mart doing were:
A mallard duck decided to nest in the straw bales around the garden supplies corral in the parking lot. Employees fenced off the nest with caution tape. Cost…maybe a dollar. The story made the front page of the local paper.
Every year, Girl Scouts are allowed to sell cookies at the entrance, and the Salvation Army is allowed to set up a bell-ringer’s kettle. Cost…nothing.
I won’t bore you with a lot of Wal*Mart-is-evil stuff. If you’d like to see it, I guess you know how to Google WalMart and labor crimes, or Now with Bill Moyers and WalMart. As for me, I’ll never go to WalMart again. Never.
