Today while in the supermarket I decided o buy some items on the clearance item shelf as these cans of fishes seemed like a god good. Listed at under $3 these items usually go for $5+. When I went to the checkout the item wasn’t able to be processed for some reason. It appeared to be registered in the system but for whatever reason it couldn’t be processed. At first the employees had to do a manual check to see if the price was accurate for the product where if so they would have to honor it. At first the worker couldn’t find it and so I showed him where it was.
Afterwards they confirmed the listed price but the staff had no idea why it a wasn’t scanning. They then asked me to wait as a bunch of higher ups then tried to register the product in the system. That still didn’t work. I was actually waiting for about thirty minutes where one of the employee mentioned he might not be able to process the order at all. That was a little ludicrous of course considering they made me wait thirty minutes and all managers should usually have some kind of override feature.
Fortunately, I am more understanding having worked in retail before and so I politely asked him to call the manger which he did. As the manager tried to figure it out elsewhere it seemed like a few minutes later they just randomly scanned it and it all of a sudden worked. The guess was that it just took time for the system to update. So after waiting over thirty minutes I paid for the purchase and left.
What crossed my mind was as a business should you compensate the customer in some way for your own mishap in these scenarios? I know when I worked at a store the customer would have most likely got a discount or gift card as an example for the trouble. I’m pretty sure if I made a real big deal out of it then they most likely would have given some kind of compensation. But should that be a default practice for a business?