Good.
But this is a valid query, as many placed DO NOT take those denominations.
Indeed, people have gotten arrested for trying to pass off 2-dollar bills as currency.
Cite? If they are genuine U. S. currency, then no one has gotten arrested for trying to spend a $2 bill. People have had the police called, but the officer usually laughs along at the clerk’s ignorance.
We’ve also had issues with very very old bills (so far the oldest I’ve seen was one from 1932) and the earlier, large half dollars.
Since I work in the cash office they call me over for currency verification if I’m on duty. I’ve found some funny money - hundreds, mostly, but once a fake ten - and lots of foreign currency. I’ve had to explain that things like watermarks weren’t in bills prior to 1980 but they’re still real money. The 1932 one I couldn’t be sure was real - it certainly predated a lot of current anti-counterfeit stuff, and it was sooooo crisp and new-feeling… The detector pen said it was OK but those aren’t 100% reliable and can give false negatives if the counterfeiters know how they work. I finally said I couldn’t prove it wasn’t legit. They took the first 1932 hundred but when someone else showed up later with three Benjamins from 1932 all crisp and new-feeling the manager said they could take it to the bank across the street and exchange it for something more modern. Not sure if that was kosher or not, but it wasn’t my call on that one.
As far as I can tell from the original story, the store and the cops had specific (albeit erroneous) concerns about those $2 bills, not $2 bills in general:
I have another one from my online shop. Twice in the last month this has happened. Customer who placed an order emails me two or three days later complaining that they never got an order confirmation and wondering what’s up with that. I take a look before I email them back to tell them:
Hi, yes we got your order and it was shipped on $day. Our system send a text message order confirmation and shipping update to the phone number you entered, since you didn’t enter an email address. But if that phone number was a landline, you won’t get the text messages.
I never hear back from them after that. I suspect (and actually hope) they’re kind of embarrassed.
Speaking of police, someone once went to the police because we wouldn’t take his American Express card. I wish I could have heard that conversation!
I can see why they would be cautious. They had reasonable grounds to be suspicious that the bills were counterfeit. That didn’t call for the customer to be arrested and taken to jail. I realize this happened in 2005, but if it had happened to me, I would have considered suing for false arrest.
Our local supermarket has a wonderful free click and collect service, I do wonder at the profitability of this, we order and pay online, a staff member wanders the aisles putting together our order and we collect it from the front desk at the chosen time. It gives little chance to get us to buy more than we intended though the minimum spend does mean we don’t do it for a loaf of bread and litre of milk. It seems contrary to basic marketing principles but it works great for us, we are saving a lot of money.
I’m curious - do you work at the store level or the corporate level?
On the other hand, I once had to do the buying for everything needed plumbing-wise to hook up my shed house to the sewer and plumb in water and two sinks, a toilet and a shower–and I got the plumbing wizard at Home Despot who literally, I shit you not, laid out every single piece required in order on the floor so I could take a picture of it to text to my contractor to make sure it was all correct. Dude had it spot on and I had everything needed for the project in ONE trip. That guy was amazing.
On the third hand, when you’re checking the website to make sure a store has something, quite often there will be stock listed but it’s not in the store at all because it’s on a truck that’s in transit (website gets updated that the store has the items if they’ve been ordered but not yet delivered) or possibly in a trailer that’s been dropped out in the yard but not yet unpacked and stocked. This can be suuuuuuuuuper frustrating!
Several factors to this:
Foremost is of course to build customer loyalty before Amazon brings Prime Pantry to your area.
They get at least $75 in guaranteed sales, versus the $5 they would get if you walked into the store and just bought bread and milk. IIRC, when Safeway first started their free delivery, it was at $49 min and it’s now $80. In time in will be $100 and keep rising as more people get used to and dependent on it.
Many (most?) non-sale items are priced higher than instore. And because of slotting fees, the products that are available online are either sponsored by the manufacturer or distributor either directly or though discounts. I just checked Safeway and see another little trick. Bananas are .89/lb instore, but .36 each online. It’s a sure bet that the person picking the banana for you isn’t going to give you the biggest and heaviest.
Which leads to produce and meats. You lose the ability of preference. The person doing the picking likely won’t pick the worse (that would be a turn off to use of the service), but they won’t spend the time you would instore making a decision. I wouldn’t be surprised if now or in the future, there’s a stock of produce that the produce person culled while putting them on display. Still perfectly good, but less likely to be chosen.
The store may not make as much profit off delivery as they would instore, but by the nickel and dime tactics I’ve listed above, they’re minimizing the difference.
The above might be true for a store employee doing the picking, but for a third party doing the picking not so much. The folks doing the picking/home delivery for my store are functioning as independent contractors (like Uber and Lyft drivers) and very much have an interest in keeping their clients happy. Happy customers are more likely to tip, and some tip heavily.
Also, the shoppers doing this work, being people who have turned shopping into an actual job, sometimes a full time time, are going to shop MUCH more quickly and efficiently than you or I would. I’ve seen these folks filling two or three orders simultaneously, including some very specific requests, and doing it quickly.
Less than perfect produce, by the way, is usually utilized in cut portions - any bruised/bad portions are cut away and the prepped containers of fruit or sliced vegetables are where those go. Or they wind up in the various salads in the deli. If it’s fit for human consumption the store is going to try to find a way to make it sellable.
I don’t know if this happens at Home Depot (which has more large expensive items than Michaels, where I worked) but at Michaels, it drove the entire IT group insane because corporate would not allow the store employees to check the corporate deliveries at all. So inventory says you have x number of items because it was supposed to be in your delivery, but that box ended up at the wrong store? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Guess your inventory is off.
Sometimes people will insist I made a mistake ringing up their items. Hey, I’m only human and it happens. But after you empty the bags and check every item and the prices with the receipt, and count the number of items and see it matches the number of items on the receipt, don’t keep insisting “the girl made a mistake” and hang around complaining until we have to call the police to get you to leave the store.
When I was at Safeway SOP in this scenario was full refund->re-ring entire order at another register->during that, first till is counted up. 99 times out of 100, the checker was exactly right. That 100th time, they undercharged the customer. In 12 years, not once did I ever see it go the customer’s way.
I’ve ordered things for pickup at Target that showed in-stock online and when I went to the store (after getting a confirmation email), it wasn’t there because it wasn’t on the shelf. What likely happened was someone picked up the last one and hadn’t checked out yet, so inventory still showed it was there.
When I worked it OfficeMax it was so incredibly bad. The system would show negative inventory! When I asked how that was possible, I was told that if the computer showed zero in stock, but the item (because of poor inventory management) was rung up, it would go negative. We also had the issue with items in transit because the system didn’t distinguish what was on the shelf and what was in transit.
A couple of weeks ago I ordered a UPS online and went to pick it up a couple of days later. The guy at OfficeMax couldn’t find it and asked me why I was there to pick it up…I told him…“Because I got the pickup confirmation.” (I tried my best to be polite since I used to work at that store). He was ready to give up and looked one more time. Turns out it was transferred from another store and wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
Interesting about using independent contractors. Makes sense since AFAIK, most of the employees in chain supermarkets are union. I hadn’t thought about tipping for delivery (haven’t done it yet, but I got some coupons). There goes my $10 off delivery!
Yes, I’m well aware of what happens to less than perfect fruit in supermarket. This is also the reason why I’ve heard to never order a fruit or vegetable platter at a hotel. Though of course most of the “ugly fruit” is still perfectly fine and the less then perfect veggies go into stocks, soups or stews.
Edit: My local supermarkets offer bags of overripe bananas at a big discount marked “Banana Bread?”. I’ve never seen that at Safeway.
Veering off topic, but my Dad loved persimmons, especially Japanese persimmons (the ones that look like orange tomatoes). Since they were so seasonal, the supermarkets would just have a few cases of them. At first my Dad buy them and wait until they’re almost overripe before eating them, but soon realized that letting them get really overripe made them even sweeter (overly sweet for me). He worked out a deal with the produce guy at the local market and agreed to buy all the leftover persimmons that would otherwise be tossed at a discount. He tried to make the same deal at Safeway, but was told they couldn’t do that, they’d have to be tossed per policy.
My Dad would toss the bargain persimmons in the freezer and eat one or two every night until they were gone. He’s peel away the skin and put in in bowl and eat it like sherbert.
We get that where I work, but when it happens we send a human to investigate and correct the inventory numbers. The inventory folks start their shift by printing out a report of any such instances so they can take care of those errors.