The Ethics of Checkout

Here’s an example of a problem you will see a lot in retail, if you are ever unfortunately enough to work in the lower end of that industry. Imagine that you’ve completed all of your shopping, reached the checkout counter, and unloaded all of your items onto the belt. There’s only one person in front of you, and she doesn’t have all that much in her basket, so you figure that this shouldn’t be too bad. Then the person in front of you pulls out the ad circular for this week and starts disputing every price that gets rung up, despite the fact that the items she’s buying are not the same ones being advertised (the ad circular has the 15 ounce size, and she’s picked up the 25 ounce size, for example) and the price differences are trivial anyway ($2.19 as opposed to $2.39, for example). The customer then complicates the check-out itself as much as possible, asking to have this many dollars taken from her gift card and paying the rest in cash, which requires a Manager with a key to over-ride and soaks up even more of your time…

Now imagine that just at this point, the customer “remembers” that she also has something to return, and wants to apply the credit to this purchase, so she needs to run over to the Customer Service desk and wait for the seven people already in line there to be helped so she can complete her order. If you wish to imagine that your purchases are three times more expensive than hers, or that yours include food items that you need to take home and refrigerate before they spoil (or in some cases, melt), go ahead – that was the case for me when I encountered this precise scenario a few weeks back. Which, naturally enough, leads me to not one but two questions regarding what to do about this situation…

First of all, if you’re the checker involved, what are you supposed to do about customers like this? In many companies, your pay depends on the number of items scanned and the number of customers processed in any given hour, and even if it doesn’t you’ve still got customers backing up behind this twit while she carries on as if she’s the only person in the world (and the only customer your store will ever have). At the same time, you’ve undoubtedly got a set of customer service rules to follow, and they probably include taking care of every customers needs and making every customer as happy as possible, things which make telling a specific customer to take her return and insert it rectally a bit difficult. How do you keep this one specific customer from getting upset when her preposterous demands are not met, but simultaneously keep the dozen or so additional customers she is inconveniencing from having a meltdown in front of you?

Which brings me to the second question: if you are the floor manager entrusted with the smooth operation of this store, how do you keep the dozen or so increasingly angry customers from rioting – or even worse, walking out of your store and never returning? Clearly, the tactic of just ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away is not going to work; you could open another check stand nearby and divert your angry customers to it; if you have enough of them, you could probably defuse the entire situation, but unless you’ve got extra checkers on call, you’re probably going to end up running that register yourself – and that isn’t a good choice either, since you can’t attend to any of your (literally hundreds) of other duties on the sales floor if you’re stuck on a register…

So how are you going to handle this? Are you going to risk having your problem customer call Corporate and complain because you wouldn’t let her take 25 minutes to check out? Are you going to risk having the dozen or so other customers she’s inconveniencing call corporate and complain about the situation? Are you going to try throwing money, or person-hours, or free food, or some other perk (it all comes back to money anyway) at the problem? Or are you just going to go and hide in the back room and hope everything goes away before something happens that will get you fired…

It’s worth thinking about…