I have a New Concept for the Target Stores: Having salespeople who can actually sell you stuff…and this goes for Home Depot, as well. In the last month, I've had two instances, one at each chain, where I wanted to buy something, the store's computer system seemed to be doing everything possible to prevent that transaction from transacting and human beings were of little use to override it. I'll start with the Home Depot story…
I needed to buy something for my house. Never mind what it was. Call it Item A. Item A sells everywhere for $99.00 but a lot of stores were out of it and I needed one A.S.A.P. The Home Depot website told me that my nearest Home Depot had about a dozen available so I went there and was unable to find even one on their shelves. I asked a helpful store employee who told me they were out of stock. I told her their website said they had about a dozen. She looked it up online and, sure enough, that was what it said: 11 of them in stock.
She asked a senior member of the staff who looked it up and after intensive study told her and me, "Oh, yes. We have them but they're for online sales."
I asked if they could sell me one of those. She fiddled with the computer terminal for a while and told me, "We can. The in-store price is $149.00." I pointed to the first computer screen where it still said they were $99. She said, "That's the price if you order it on the web and then come in and pick it up here" and I think I'll switch to script format here and make this more readable…
ME: Do I have to pay online?
SHE: No. You can pay here. You just have to place the order on the web.
ME (waving my iPhone:) So if I go to your website and order one, you can sell it to me for fifty dollars less?
SHE: That's right. The only thing is you'll have to wait until your order drops.
ME: "Drops?"
SHE: Right. Because you're ordering it from the main company. You'll have to wait until they process your order and they forward it to us before we can fill it.
ME: And how long do we think that will take?
SHE: Two or three hours. If you'd like, we can phone or text you when the order comes in so you can come back and get it.
By now, a stockboy had brought one of Item A out from the stockroom and it was sitting on the counter not two feet from me. I pointed to it and said, "Because that's ever so much easier for everyone than you just selling this to me right now?"
SHE: I didn't arrange the system, sir. If you'd like to take it now, there may be a way I can sell it to you but the computer will say it's an in-store purchase and I'll have to charge you the in-store price of $149. If you order it online and come back to get it later, I'm sure I can let you have it for the online price of $99.
ME: You do know this is ridiculous. You have a customer here who wants to buy this item. You are in the business of selling items. I have the money to purchase this item…
A supervisor or manager or someone with more power was summoned and much discussion ensued. I think the whole thing took 45 minutes before the person with more power decided they probably wouldn't get in trouble if they sold me the online-only item in-store and they could give me a "courtesy discount" and let me have it for $99.
The argument at Target took about the same length of time. Amber and I had gone to buy supplies and we filled two shopping carts with one Item B, a couple of Item Cs, one each of Items D, E and F and so on. It was a lot of stuff and it took us quite a while to locate it all and fill our carts, but that's one of the appeals of a store like Target. You can stock up on everything you'll need for the next new months in one visit.
The checkout guy scanned it all, item by item, which took a fair amount of time since — I'll put this nicely — he wasn't the swiftest scanner in the retail business. And then about two-thirds of the way through the process, he noticed (as I had, only moments before he did) that the prices of each item were not appearing on his computer screen as he scanned them. Not until he punched in some sort of employee code did they began appearing.
I had inserted my credit card into their reader and once everything was packed into bags, it charged my card and he told me the price was $85 and change.
If I'd just kept my silly mouth shut and left, I would have saved hundreds of dollars and a lot of time but Dummy Me had to say, "Wait…that can't be right." He looked at the bags and the quantity of purchases therein and said, "Oh, of course not. The computer must be malfunctioning."
I said, "I think the problem is that you logged-in in the middle of scanning and it's only reporting the items you scanned after you logged-in." He said that couldn't possibly have been what happened but obviously it was and he knew it was. He started trying to figure out which items he'd scanned before the log-in so he could scan them anew. I insisted that if he was going to do that, he void the $85 charge to my card and start over. It took him a good five minutes to figure out how to do that but he did it. Then he started trying to figure out the most efficient way to unbag our items, scan them all again and rebag: Should he unbag everything at once or do one bag at a time?
By now, there was a long line of other shoppers, some with just one or two items, waiting behind us to pay. A Supervisor Lady came over to see what the problem was and I explained. Without a hint of apology — it was the computer's fault, not the clerk's and somehow not the store's — she told him to unbag everything and scan it all again.
Amber suggested this could be done by someone else. If the same guy had attempted it, we'd still be there. The Supervisor Lady agreed and called for two more employees to move the stuff we were trying to purchase to an adjoining, closed checkout line and take everything out of the bags. She herself would ring them up.
She made it as far as the fourth item, which was a package of paper towels. I was watching the screen that said what the item was and how much it was. The paper towels came through as "Despicable Me" for what I think was probably the wrong price and I pointed this out. The amount seemed to me more like the price for a Despicable Me DVD, which is not what we were buying. The Supervisor Lady told me the computer was probably malfunctioning giving the wrong names for the items but the prices were surely correct. That did not seem like a belief in which I could put a lot of faith.
The lady who was bagging for her said, "They did an offer on these paper towels that tied-in with the Despicable Me movie a few years ago. That's why the name of the movie is listed for these paper towels." Okay, that's possible but by now, I was untrusting of the store and its computer…and I wasn't buying the premise that the store and its employees were blameless if the computer was screwing up. That seemed to be the prevailing attitude I was getting.
So a few screw-ups later, I told them to just forget the whole thing and Amber and I left and went to another store. That meant more driving and filling our carts again but everything there was totaled correctly (I think) and it came to a bit over $400.
I called the main Target offices and got the person you're supposed to get when you have a complaint. It was a gent who obviously had a bunch of prepared scripts in front of him and his job was to read me the generic apology that seemed most applicable to my problem and get rid of me. It pretty much came down to "We deeply regret that this happened and we hope you'll consider shopping at Target again. Bye-bye!"
The next day, I phoned up and got the manager of the Target store where it all happened and she was very sincere and pained to hear it but it all came down to "We deeply regret that this happened and we hope you'll consider shopping at Target again. Bye-bye!" Neither gave me any reason to believe that it wouldn't. And of course, neither offered a discount or a gift card or reimbursement for my parking or anything to lure me back.
But the thing is: I will be back. These stores have good prices and they're convenient and I don't have a lot of better options. Everywhere is like that these days.
I know they don't screw up most of the time and that I just got unlucky and I'm sure I'll get unlucky again someday. My problem is not so much with the people or the computers as it is with the power structure between them. At the Home Depot, it took 45 minutes for what should have been a one-minute transaction. The computer essentially said, "No, no! You can't sell this item to the customer who is standing there eager to pay our advertised purchase price for it!" And it took the 45 minutes to work around that digital decree.
At Target, the computer was scanning items but not registering their prices and it may not have been totaling what it did total correctly. In both cases, the human beings in those stories were helpless to do anything about the problems.
I have a GPS in my car that works great…most of the time. If I'm driving to my home from the south, it tells me the wrong route. When I'm approaching my garage and all I have to do is to continue in the same direction for four blocks and I'm there, it's telling me to hang a right and make four turns to travel an extra fifteen blocks to get to my garage. Something similar happens when I'm heading east on Franklin approaching the Magic Castle. I can see the entrance right ahead of me and the GPS wants me to make a left on Sycamore and head up into the Hollywood Hills.
I need to treat the GPS as a guide and to occasionally override its commands. Retailer clerks need to be able to say "This isn't right" and to override the machines when they're wrong. In both cases, the store employees knew something was wrong. They just didn't know how to work around that something wrong. Look — I love computers. You may be amazed to learn that I'm using one right now and there's a good chance that you are, too. But they're built by humans so they're subject to human error, which can only be corrected by human effort.
Also, the Target stores need to field customer complaints with something more substantial than "We're sorry we screwed up. Give us another try and maybe we won't." Imagine if someday you heard that from a hospital that removed the wrong kidney.