How To Lose A Sale

On the way over to D's for dinner last night, she asked that I pick some stuff up from Shop-Rite, including a pound of coffee from the Dunkin' Donuts inside there. So I go in, it's about 7pm, and pick up the bag of coffee. There's a sign there: "Coffee Bag purchases may be rung up at registers after 8 p.m." Since it's still only 7, I go over to the Dunkin' Donuts register instead. She rings it up, I hand over my American Express. She says, "oh we don't take that." OK, that's not uncommon, I exchange it for my Visa. "Cash only," she says.

I tell her I have no cash. She suggests I go hit an ATM (and, of course, pay a service charge). I said, "Well, clearly in an hour it'd be ok for me to buy this at the regular cashier, can I just take it over there and pay for it?"

Nope, only allowed to take it over there when the Dunkin Donuts staff is not around not just when they refuse to take your payment.

The lessons for retailers here are twofold:

1. - Make payment methods consistent. If I walk into a grocery store that has the Visa/MasterCard/AmEx/Discover logos in a big sticker on the door, I don't expect you to tell me when I get inside that "this little portion over here doesn't take any of those". If the store takes these various payments, everything in that store should take those payment methods.

2. - Arbitrary rules suck, and piss off your customers. Clearly, Shop-Rite's registers are capable of ringing me up for the coffee. If I'd come there an hour later, they'd have been happy to do so. Clearly, they've already sorted out "how to reimburse Dunkin' Donuts for pounds of coffee that get rung up at the normal registers." If all that is the case, don't force me to pay for that coffee at the Dunkin Donuts register. Even if they took my payment method, you're making me stand in two separate lines when all I really need to do is stand in one. But, especially when they're not capable of taking my payment, it's clearly in the retailer's best interest to let me use another established payment location (the checkout lanes) so as to bring in the money.

Instead, what they got was me telling the girl to void the coffee sale, and then went through the checkout lanes with the rest of my stuff. They could easily have had $7.99 more worth of purchase, but they clearly didn't want it bad enough.