Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Running game at other places

I've said before that I like to watch retail interactions at other stores. I witnessed one of the all-time great customer interactions today at a Sports Authority.

Anyway. I'm waiting in line at the cash register at Sports Authority. This woman has a huge pile of stuff - including a pink Nike gym bag.

The woman hands over all her stuff and holds up the gym bag for the cashier to scan. The cashier asks her to open it. Uh-huh. Just like the suitcases at Wal-Mart.

The woman opens the bag, revealing a wad of plastic wrap. The girl asks to see the bag. The woman is strangely resistant. The cashier insists.

The woman finally makes a **sigh** noise and forks the bag over.

What was in the bag? Six more folded up and flattened down versions of the same bag, carefully packed into the bottom of the original bag and covered with extra packing material to make it look like the bag's lumpiness was just extra packing stuff - NOT stolen merchandise.

The cashier was just like "Oh, I wonder why they decided to put the extra bags in here. Let me give you a new one." The woman was visibly NOT pleased but had no room to maneuver.

And I've got to say, Sports Authority trains their cashiers far better than the Wal-Mart. They have the money pens and check every bill that's a $20 and larger.

Of course, if Wal-Mart started checking every $20 and up, it would just make the lines even longer!

Later, as I was leaving, I saw the woman and three of her "companions" changing clothes in the parking lot. Old men should really not be digging around in their underpants in public places at 2 p.m. Really. Just really not.

12 comments:

Mark H. Besotted said...

Just a quick reminder from another Wal-Mart drone. Those counterfeit pens are crap. Crap, I tell you!

They just check to see if the paper has starch in it. So if the counterfeiters use a slightly higher quality paper (or, as I personally saw last week, bleach a five and use their computer's printer to turn it into a hundred) the pen is unable to tell.

I always check bills by looking at the "color-shifting ink" in the bottom right corner. I've never seen that faked correctly yet.

Nicholas Weaver said...

Seconded on the silly pen. Don't bother, they are almost snake-oil.

Any bill that the pen detects should feel "really wrong", and I know of jokers who will starch their money so their real money will set off those pens.

You should be trained to look for the following things:

The color change ink.

The watermark portrait (to the right of the big portrait)

The security thread with the denomination printed (location varies).

The best counterfeit detector system I've seen has you toss the bill under a UV lamp and you look at the color and location of the thread (each denomination glows differently.)

Anonymous said...

You know, that could have been an accident. Last year at Christmas I was buying some decorative hat boxes from my favorite discount store (not Wal-Mart) to fill with spa products and give to the older ladies in my family. When the cashier opened them, one of them had another, smaller one inside. I was in such a rush that day that I didn't even think to look. It was kind of embarrassing, but the cashier was nice about it.

Anonymous said...

Suburban Socialite, those are supposed to be like that--they're sold in sets and called "nesting boxes."

Larry Kollar said...

Socialite, it's possible... but then why would she have been so reluctant to open the bag & then sigh when the cashier caught it?

Heidi said...

Suburban Socialite, those are supposed to be like that--they're sold in sets and called "nesting boxes."

Omigod. I am laughing myself silly right now. That's exactly what I was thinking!

Yes, I don't think it was an "accident" all those Nike bags were folded up inside that one Nike bag.

Anonymous said...

Astounding. Six giant guards should have immediately come out of the back room and beat her like they owned her.
The cops in my town arrested a kid 12 times for driving without a license...let him go every time. The 13th time he was going 65 in a residential area, caught big air over a hill, hit a tree, and killed the girl riding with him. Did he go to jail? Nope. A week later he was arrested twice more for driving w/o a license and released!! (exclamation points needed) Then, ironically, he was caught in the local high school with a 5-iron breaking windows and was jailed on property crimes.
You can google this all: Ricky Turco

Anonymous said...

Actually, they were all priced separately, not as sets. Each had it's own bar code.

Anonymous said...

So maybe these were "nesting" Nike bags. Really! No, not really.

Library Rat said...

HAHAHA

PWN3D!

Anonymous said...

When I was trained at Walmart I was told to use the pen on all bills over $20 and I did ....religiously. That is until it didn't catch a fake $100 bill; something just wasn't right it felt funny but it looked normal (it was an old one - before all of the new things to look for) and the guy was looking too intensely like he was waiting for something. I practically scribbled on the bill with the pen and it said 'real'. Yes it was my first retail job and I had no idea what to do. I took the money and got a lesson from our LP guy on what to look for next time.

I still use the pen because Walmart says to but I put no stock in it.

Anonymous said...

some info for those who don't know what to look for http://www.secretservice.gov/money_detect.shtml