Retail Musings: The Case of the Incorrect Price
Time for another tale of retail woe, only this one doesn’t go in the anticipated direction. It is not uncommon for price tickets in stores to be wrong. Imagine a wad of price tickets, a line of products that is several metres long, and then beyond that, several more rows of products! Where I currently work this is not so much of a problem, but in other locations price changes would serve as an absolute ball ache. What would make them even worse is that they would often require printing out, which would take time, and there was always the possibility a page or two would get missed.
What would usually happen is that a customer would bring an item to the till, and together we’d discover it was higher in price than advertised. Cue removing the incorrect ticket, price-matching the till to the ticket (as was company policy), and making a note to replace the ticket. On one occasion, I wound up flabbergasted by a customer’s issue with the price…
He was an older gentleman, and all I can presume is that he was in a bad mood, and looking for an excuse to be difficult. I scanned an item (I forget what it was, possibly some sort of folder), and he asked me to accompany him to the bay he’d scooped it from. The price on the ticket was higher than the price on the till. You would think this was good news (who doesn’t like the pleasant surprise of a lower price?), but the grumpy git proceeded to complain that the staff were not doing their jobs properly. He was genuinely annoyed that a bunch of human beings working for something approximating minimum wage, in a store that lurched between unbearably hot and freezing cold, whilst dealing with customer enquiries whilst having to change thousands of prices, had missed one.
I was tempted to offer to raise the price to match the ticket, but I suspect this smartass response would have triggered a complaint!
The moral of this story ‘kats? Try to have some understanding. Those of us who work in retail are not machines. We are human beings, subject to all the flaws, whims and stresses that brings. Having price changes to do does not mean we have no other tasks. Customers have to be served. Stock needs to be put out. There’s all sorts of other stuff going on. You will not find a shop that can boast perfection, and it is not a reasonable expectation.
