@meanjoe75fan Some time back my wife and I had dinner at a downtown restaurant. The bill came to $41, and I gave the waitress 3 $20 bills. She took off and promptly disappeared! After waiting a while I went to the cashier and was told she had gone home. A $19 tip for a poorly served $41 meals is rather excessive.
I requested my change and was given the $19 and a receipt. The cashier asked if I wanted to leave a tip for the absconding waitress. I said only when hell freezes over.
“I now am running into waiters and waitresses and even store cashiers who dare ask when I pay in cash if I want my change.”
I have to admit that I haven’t run into that type of situation, Marnet, but–then again–I only pay cash at the barber shop, the car wash, and for the occasional lottery ticket. Everything else goes on a credit card. However, what I have begun to run into are the following very annoying scenarios. It seems that, in many stores, I am now asked one of the following questions:
Do you want a receipt?
(Huh? Of course I want a receipt!)
Do you want me to print a receipt for you, or do you want it e-mailed to you?
(First of all, I don’t want to give you my e-mail address, and secondly…why should I use MY printer ink and paper to print your store’s receipt?)
Receipts are useless to me so I as I usually say no if given an option, not like I could find the right one if needed. Menards, as I always use the same debit card, has a machine that will look up purchases and print a receipt. ,
Be sure you look at the total before you sign! I got charged $2600 due to clerk error for a $15 purchase, and did not look at the receipt. I had to juggle a few funds to cover the automatic mortgage deduct, necessary for free banking, as I noticed it the next day online, just coincidence I was looking. Had enough to cover the charge but not enough to cover the upcoming deduct.
Luckily I found that receipt, and the quicke gas stop manager was in the day after, looked it up and processed a refund, and it took 10 days to get the refund.
I use a cash back credit card, I receive cash for paying bills online and that may be why I don’t have the difficulty some of you people are having.
@VDCdriver Yes, the endless questions at checkout wanting my phone number, email address, do I want a receipt followed by pressure to go online afterwards to take a survey, etc is a royal pain. Just process my credit card or take my cash, hand me a receipt and purchased goods, say thank you, and let me go on my way. Answer to all those questions from me is a firm NO.
Do you want to know why I ask a customer if he/she wants the credit or debit card receipt? Because I got tired of handing them a receipt and watching them throw it in the garbage on the way out the door. Probably half say they don’t need their copy of the receipt. Handing everyone a receipt without asking if they want it is wasteful.
@asemaster. I hadn’t thought about that nor, frankly, paid attention to how other people do or don’t treat receipts. I can see your point. Perhaps I will rethink my reaction to some of the questions about receipts. Some but not all. 
Working for the public is stressful enough and not really well paid. Management requires the employees to recite certain things to every customer, just think how tiresome that must be. I try to be as polite to them as possible, if I have a gripe there are managers who are paid to listen to them.
I usually never take a receipt. Why would I need one? I use mainly a debit card or checks and I’m not going to use them to balance my account anyway. Once a month I look at the statements and can pretty much remember if anything is off or not.
I don’t go for the old people discount days. I don’t like to be around people reminding me of how old I am but frankly never can remember it anyway. Did you ever think though that maybe the reason to not use a self checkout for the senior discount is that there is now way to plug the discount in yourself? How would you do it and how would the machine know you were a senior?
The other thing is that if something costs you $10 now at the store, just because you do some of the work doesn’t mean you should get a dollar back. Maybe because people do some of the work, the price won’t be raised to $11 next time. A lot of these places operate on razor thin margins and every little bit helps. Plus receipt paper is not cheap either.
Hi, could you please bring this back on topic? Thanks.
I’ll get back to cars, I suppose . . .
After work, I drove to a Staples near my house, to get a 8.5 x 11 sheet laminated. The guy said wait time was 1 hour. I said “Forget it” and drove home to look on the staples website
I phoned a different staples store, and asked them what the waiting time would be for a single sheet laminated. The clerk proceeded to tell me that it would probably be at least an hour, if not longer. In fact, I might have to pick it up the next day. I demanded to be connected with the person at the copy/print section.
She said she could laminate a single sheet right away. I said thanks and drove over there
I walked up, and she gave me my choices of 3 different mil thicknesses, then proceeded to laminate my sheet
By the time I was home again, less than 1 hour had passed, from the time I left the LOSER staples store, drove home, made my call, drove to the other staples store, got my sheet laminated, paid, and drove home again
I suppose what I’m saying is this . . . if I feel I’m being jerked around, or I’m getting bad service, I’ll GLADLY drive elsewhere to get my stuff done
Perhaps the LOSER staples store was understaffed, maybe the guy wasn’t fast, etc. But all I know is I don’t feel like waiting 1 hour to get one single sheet laminated.
What was the subject again? Checking oil? I’ve tried to stimulate interest in my wife to check oil etc. but it just doesn’t seem to take. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to get her to know how to use the mower and the snow blower and plumbing and electrical etc. but no go. So I said what if I wasn’t around and she just said she would hire someone. Maybe we really are expendable.
As far as Staples, there are a couple different philosophies in managing incoming jobs. Some folks believe in first in first out period. Other places like to try and meet your needs. I always appreciated shops that would be able to get your car in right away and left enough slop in their schedules to meet your needs. I screwed up one time and had a dead short in an injector so the car couldn’t be driven much. I went to a new shop because I had had it with my old shop, but they couldn’t even look at it for four days. I went back to my old place and they got me right in and fixed it that day. If you need an engine, that’s one thing, but if you have a small issue causing big problems, its nice to at least have someone able to take a look right away. I think its important for managing a multitude of jobs and customer expectations.
I think a lot of it is gender-phobic. Real women may pump gas*, but apparently, they don’t check oil or other icky stuff under the hood. Or at least, many of them don’t.
I think this is foolishness. I might not know much about sewing–but if I were making my own parachute, damn skippy I’d be a whiz with a Singer! Similarly, the stakes are high enough with a primary mode of transport to justify stepping outside one’s designated gender roles.
P.S. I make this assertion after having several several female customers of mine have engine issues with oil starvation. I refilled with oil, showed them just how to work a dipstick…and got offered cash to do this task for them periodically as it “wasn’t something they’d ever do.” (One widowed, one divorced). Thus, I draw my conclusion.
@meanjoe75fan I think you have a valid point. Some men I know can’t be bothered to check their oil or anything else on their cars. But almost all women I know won’t do so, expecting men to do it for them.
There are many manual labor tasks, whether unskilled or skilled, I never learned to do when young and have discovered I cannot handle nowadays, even after attempting to learn, due to physical limitations. But I try not to have a closed mind to learning.
On the other hand I firmly subscribe to the theory that anything with more than two legs is livestock so spiders are livestock and wrangling livestock is men’s work, ergo killing Giant Attack Spiders is men’s work! Failing brave manly presence, I make do with a broom because the reason brooms have long handles is so one can kill things from a distance. Were life a cartoon, the proper method of spider disposal would be with tank artillary, prepared to drive in reverse at flank speed in case of missing the target.
Sorry about the run on paragraph. I am in mobile site access where formatting doesn’t work.
I work with a lot of software engineers who don’t know what a dip-stick is let alone what to do with it. They make good money…so they are wasting their time doing menial tasks.
At the age of 16 my daughter knew how to change her oil, do a tuneup and even showed her how to change the pads my 98 Pathfinder (which eventually became hers). She balked at changing the timing-belt.
Yea, I don’t know anyone who checks their oil for the fun of it. It’s a dirty thing to do - you get stains on your hands, maybe on your clothes. No way am I doing that if I can possibly avoid it. And if I have to go get changed, and put on gloves and get a paper towel, it’s now a 30 min rigmarole for no good reason. Cars work fine without me getting dirty every time I get gas or every week or whatever.
“Cars work fine without me getting dirty every time I get gas or every week or whatever.”
…until they don’t, and that’s when it gets expensive.
Needlessly expensive…
With respect to other folks’ experiences, checking the oil dipstick and tire pressure all around need only slightly dirty hands at worst and take no more than relatively few minutes or so at most if needing to add air to tires and/or top off fluids.
…until they don’t, and that’s when it gets expensive.
Needlessly expensive…
Apparently it isn’t getting expensive for the vast majority. Else it would self correct.