I was reading  Wendy’s Annoying Gift Card Policy Keeps ‘Em Coming Back on consumerist.com this morning, It is a short article, but here is the gist of it:

If I buy food totaling 20.84 from Wendy’s and pay with two fifteen dollar gift cards, how many gift cards should I have left?

…

If you work at Wendy’s, the confusing answer is ‘2′.

…

I ordered my food, handed the employee two gift cards, and a full five minutes of her fiddling with the credit-scanner, got my food. When I received my gift cards back, I received two, one with about three dollars and another with roughly seven, not the one with approximately ten. Curious, I asked why. Gleefully, the the Employee responded with "It’s policy to divide them up evenly between all the gift cards. That way, it’s more likely that you’ll come back!"

Some comments came to my mind :

• This may or may not of been Wendy’s/Arby’s official policy – what a store employee and/or its manager says, or owner/operator/franchisee says I’d take as a grain salt unless it is consistent across stores and employees.

• I have had similar experiences that have frustrated me as a consumer at the Point-of-Sale that either come down to poor systems design/integration or poor training of staff – Ever see glazed eyes when you present a gift card ?

• Training Issues – I recently ordered some food at a similar quick service restaurant and the person didn’t know how to run a credit card, he swiped the card, but didn’t enter an amount, and I paid for another person’s meal, who paid for another and so on. (This was with a shared stand alone terminal – I think it was actually a Hypercom T7p)  It’s pretty funny when you payment card receipt doesn’t match the register receipt.

• Poorly designed system or integration with cash register’s and or payment terminals. This can depend on if the gift card issuer supports partial authorization, has the ability to return a balance, and if the POS equipment can handle this or not.

• Lastly: If you are a merchant, the customer doesn’t care about "how the system or computer works", or excuses, they want to engage in effective commerce, and move on. Frustrations at the sale or return process encourage your customer to go somewhere else. There is one electronics retailer that I will not return to because they made me wait for them to do an "inventory count" of a product before I could do a return. Don’t let technology not enable you, and don’t let it disable you, have processes to handle exceptions in an off-line mode, to keep the lines moving

No related posts.