It’s Saturday evening. The post office counters are closed, but the building leaves its lobby open 24 hours a day so that people with P.O. boxes can access them. They also have vending machines in the lobby that dispense stamps.
Well, I put $40 into one of these post office vending machines to buy a $7.40 packet of stamps. While it was dispensing my change, the machine asked, “Do you want a receipt? Y/N”. I pressed “N.”
And AFTER the machine was done asking me if I wanted a receipt and dispensing change, it blithely informed me “$20 in change was dispensed. Get remaining change at P.O. counter.” And didn’t ask me again if I wanted a receipt, in light of this turn of events.
Of course, since it’s Saturday night, the P.O. counters are closed, and will remain closed until Monday morning. I just know when I come in Monday morning and say, “The vending machine owes me $12.60 in change and told me to come to the P.O. counter to get it,” the lady at the counter is going to say, “Do you have a receipt?” and then I’ll have to tell her no and she won’t give me a damn cent.
It’s quite a racket they’ve got going. Ask if you want a receipt, then tell the purchaser that they’ve short-changed you. Cute. Reeeeal cute. I feel a class-action suit coming on.
I’m with Geobabe, as I don’t usually buy a cup of coffee at the 7-11 with two twenties and a ten.
Beside that, the machines have an internal audit trail not unlike those of ATMs, such that the details of your transaction should be comparable on the report to your story.
Prepare for raised eyebrows and queries of “You put in how much to buy what?” :rolleyes:
Well … yes, actually! That was, in fact, why I put in two twenties. I happen to like the Sacagawea dollar coin.
I didn’t find out 'til afterward that the machine will only cough up a maximum of 20 dollar coins in change per transaction. (And over half of those weren’t even Sackies – they were plain old leftover Susan B. Anthony dollars. Bleah.)
Okay, sure, the post office probably doesn’t like it when people use them as a dollar-coin dispensary. But that still doesn’t mean they should be allowed to get away with vending machines that short-change you after asking if you want a receipt.
Of course, bureaucracy being what it is, I’m still kind of pessimistic as to the P.O. counter lady’s ability to actually view that internal audit trail. It might be something they only use if, say, there’s a murder or a plane crashes into the post office and the forensics team needs the information. (You never see investigators on TV looking at the flight recorder of a plane that didn’t crash, do you?)
Obviously, tracer, what you need to do (and you’d better act quickly - it’s already 3 am Monday!) is fire-bomb the post office in question. Then, they’ll have to recover the Vending Data Recorder (VDR) from that machine, which will reveal the fact that it owes you some change.
Well … the good news is, the post office has a form you can fill out whenever the vending machines short-change you or eat your money.
The not-so-good news is that the form asks you to give the 6-digit ID number from the front of the vending machine. There are two vending machines in this post office: one has a 7-digit number on the front, and the other has no number on the front. :smack:
Okay, so, on the same day I wrote my last post in this thread, I submitted said form to the post office to request a refund. The lady at the counter said that, since the vending machines don’t have 6-digit numbers on them, I should just say something like “the vending machine on the left at thus-and-such post office.”
Well, guess what.
It’s been about 3 weeks, so I decided to swing by the post office and maybe inquire as to how long my form will take to process. When I got there, the glass on the front had been taken down and cones and warning signs had been set up as though the lobby was under construction. There were also plywood boards over the vending machines. I asked about it, and apparently about 2 weeks ago, somebody had crashed their car into the lobby, apparently killing a pregnant woman and destroying the vending machines in the process.
Never mind the fact that there was this tragic loss of life, what’s really important here is that by destroying the vending machines the car may have also destroyed the machines’ internal audit trail, which means that I might never get my $12.60 back now!!!
I didn’t just lose $12.60.
I lost $25.20.
Because what I said I did in the OP, I did twice.
The first vending machine didn’t inform me that it had short-changed me, and it was only after the second machine informed me that it would only be giving me $20 in change that I went back and counted my change from the first machine, and realized that it, too, had only given me $20 in change.
But I didn’t want this little detail to bog down my rant.
My experience with losing a buck in a U.S. postal vending machine had a positive result. There was a tel. # on the machine for problems. I called it and left my name, tel. # and msg. They called back and left a msg. asking for my address. I replied and then rec’d a dollar bill in the mail in a few days. I think they can check the machine to see what goes in (money) and what goes out (value of products). If you think it’s a scam, contact the Postal Inspection Service (criminal investigators).
UPDATE for the thronging multitudes who’ve been following this issue with bated breath:
After 2+ months of foot-dragging, failure to run an audit on their damaged vending machines, whining about being understaffed, etc., etc., the post office finally reimbursed me today. I got back all $25.20 that the vending machines owed me.
Of course, as I should have expected, the final phase of my trek wasn’t without its own pitfalls. You see, I had made a photocopy of the reimbursement form I submitted for my own records, and asked the lady behind the postal counter to date-stamp this photocopy back on February 23rd as a kind of an indication that I wasn’t making it up. Well, when the ditzy lady behind the postal counter this morning saw this photocopy in my hand, she apparently assumed that the pink postal date-stamp meant that I was holding the original in my hand, and she insisted I hand it to her because “we don’t have it and I need to make a copy”. When she came back from the back room with her supervisor’s approval for the reimbursement, not only had she not made a copy, she proceeded to print out an internal receipt and staple it to the photocopy she’d taken from me as though she were going to file it in a drawer somewhere and never let me see it again. I protested that I’d need that copy back, and she replied “But we need this to file it!” GAH! Had she completely forgotten about her promise to photocopy it in the first place? I insisted that that was my copy, not hers, but to no avail. It had a pink date-stamp on it, darn it, and that evidently proved to her microscopic little undereducated bureaucratic ditz mind that it was the property of the postal service. I insisted a few more times, and she finally went into the back room and made a copy, but when she came back out to hand me the original she stamped it and handed me the $25.20 with such machinelike coldness that I’m absolutely sure she was pissed off at me for daring to challenge her supreme postal authority.
But, regardless, the money is finally in my hot little hands now, and I swear upon the souls of the souls of my grandparents that I will never again insert so much money into a postal vending machine that it will have to cough up more than $20 in change.
Worry no more, luluBahrain! I am a reformed man. From now on, I shall use the bank to acquire Sacagawea dollar coins.
And two-dollar bills. I like two-dollar bills. I should take a bunch of them and lay 'em out in a glass picture frame. Like they did in Shallow Hal. Except they used one-dollar bills in Shallow Hal. Which are only half as good as two-dollar bills.
