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You double charged me! You had to!

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  • You double charged me! You had to!

    The other night, I was bagging for one of our cashiers. She's one of our best cashiers when it comes to interacting with the customers - always happy, always cheerful, she's fast, and her money is always spot on at the end of her shift.

    On this occasion, she

    Our registers also will occasionally say "Invalid account" when you run your card as debit. We don't know why, our vendor doesn't know why, it just happens. If you run the card again, it goes through fine. Probably the same reason why occasionally our scanners will say "Item not on file" on the first pass, then scan the item correctly on the next pass. That's the cost of running the latest and greatest technology I guess (our registers are from NCR, running on Windows XP Embedded, with an XML and HTML based customer screen.. very powerful, very customizable).

    Nobody had ever had a problem beyond a little griping until this gem.

    SC: You were pressing buttons on your little thing there when I ran it! That's why it didn't go through!

    Cashier: Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I have to press keys to send it through. It's a bug in our registers, here's what my screen says *swings cashier monitor toward customer*. If you just swipe it again, it'll work.

    SC: No, you've already charged it. I refuse to swipe it. It even asked how much cash back I wanted!

    Cashier: I can assure you, you weren't charged yet. And if you do get charged twice, we'll make it right.

    This goes back and forth, the cashier finally offers to get a manager over, customer says not to worry about it and finally... SWIPES HER CARD AGAIN. Oh no, the horrors! And it went through! The cashier was pissed enough that she just stopped talking entirely - this cashier was already pissed about having to stay past the end of her shift anyway, since we'd gotten really busy, but wasn't letting it show much.

    It doesn't sound so bad yet, until I saw the SC over at customer service a few minutes later, demanding that the frontend manager pull up every damned transaction that cashier had done during her shift. He compromised and said he would pull up the ones before and after her purchase. Surprise surprise, she was charged once, and he was able to show her the exact same error message, and told her the exact same thing.

    Then the SC went off about how rude "that girl" was and how "she must be having a bad day". Which ticked off the front end manager. He politely told the customer "If you have 10 minutes, I can tell you EXACTLY why she's having a bad day, and a lot of it has to do with this particular error coming up over and over. She's one of our best cashiers and I've never seen her take it out on a customer." The SC backed off after this.

    Wait..... did I just see management stand up for us during a complaint? Has hell frozen over?

    I really like our new front end manager.

  • #2
    We had a power failure once and somehow the UPS for debit and credit processing failed from the switch between street power and the generator. When this happened all the registers gt an error messages along the lines of credit/debit transaction failed, swipe card again. Our FEM checked and saw that indeed the transactions that hand not printed a receipt had indeed failed. Most customers didn't mind the minute wait to ensure they were not double charged.

    One SC eventually swiped, then went to Customer Service and DEMANDED a refund of her CREDIT charge TWICE because we had to double charge her. She got her one refund (back on her card), but as she left she said "I will get a refund, you cant keep my money when I get charge back from MC" and stomped out.

    Good luck on getting that charge back on a transaction that never happened.

    Comment


    • #3
      Quoth mattm04 View Post
      We had a power failure once and somehow the UPS for debit and credit processing failed from the switch between street power and the generator. When this happened all the registers gt an error messages along the lines of credit/debit transaction failed, swipe card again.
      Our registers are setup in such a way that this should never happen. All of our credit/debit/check authorization goes out over a T1 - but the T1 isn't on a UPS or on the generator.

      So when the power is out, we can't do debit at all (it'll just sit there for about 30 seconds before timing out); credit card transactions are stored on our server and automatically approved, and the charges are sent through once the T1 comes back up. Check authorization takes about 30 seconds, finally giving a message saying that the authorization timed out, but the checks are still approved. We just eat the loss if the credit cards wind up being declined.

      None of the registers or electronics (except for the deli, meat, and seafood scales) are on the generator. Instead they're all on decently sized UPSs that keep them running for about 20 minutes.

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      • #4
        More often than not we get those messages too, "Invalid Card", "Magnetic Strip Error" and a few other errors will pop up from time to time when swiping a card. There are times I have to swipe the card three, four, five times before our machines will take it. Our machines are just busted. They're not that old but they're falling apart and really fussy with how you swipe the card. :P

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        • #5
          Reminds me of the registers at the convenience store where I stop for my morning sodie. The card scanner is so fickle that the clerk has to put my card inside one of their little plastic pizza-slice bags and run it through inside its newfound protective-pizza-baggie-shield.

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          • #6
            Quoth computeraide View Post
            Reminds me of the registers at the convenience store where I stop for my morning sodie. The card scanner is so fickle that the clerk has to put my card inside one of their little plastic pizza-slice bags and run it through inside its newfound protective-pizza-baggie-shield.
            lesser thread-jack-

            Why does that work? It's always puzzled me. An earth-destroying grocery bag will do the same thing.
            / thread-jack

            Comment


            • #7
              Quoth computeraide View Post
              Reminds me of the registers at the convenience store where I stop for my morning sodie. The card scanner is so fickle that the clerk has to put my card inside one of their little plastic pizza-slice bags and run it through inside its newfound protective-pizza-baggie-shield.
              Heh, sodie I just knew you had to be from Missouri when I read that. I just love the plastic bag trick, works almost every time.

              Comment


              • #8
                My register (which only runs windows 98!) does the same thing. My solution? Hitch up my pant leg a little so I have the slack and KICK the machine. Works every time.

                Quoth computeraide View Post
                Reminds me of the registers at the convenience store where I stop for my morning sodie. The card scanner is so fickle that the clerk has to put my card inside one of their little plastic pizza-slice bags and run it through inside its newfound protective-pizza-baggie-shield.
                Quoth Bramblerose View Post
                lesser thread-jack-

                Why does that work? It's always puzzled me. An earth-destroying grocery bag will do the same thing.
                / thread-jack
                It's the plastic. I have to do that about once or twice a week.
                Now a member of that alien race called Management.

                Yeah, you see that right. Pink. Harness.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Quoth Bramblerose View Post
                  lesser thread-jack-

                  Why does that work? It's always puzzled me. An earth-destroying grocery bag will do the same thing.
                  / thread-jack
                  I know! Why the heck does a plastic grocery bag suddenly make a card that wasn't swiping swipe again? And who the heck thought of it? Who sat down and said, "Y'know, my credit card can't be read, but if I put it in a plastic bag and swipe it again, maybe the machine will take it?
                  The High Priest is an Illusion!

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Our readers do that a lot, but it's mostly because we have shitty modems. I've never had problems with customers, though... the one thing that makes our customers freak out is our check system. Basically, if our company doesn't have enough information on a customer, the computer won't accept the check... and sometimes it makes us call for verification. :\ Lots of "what do you mean you can't accept it? I know the money's there!" ensue.
                    This message brought to you by a hopeless pop-culture-obsessed social reject.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      I had it explained to me once. If I remember correctly, the card needs to have a certain thickness of plastic for the scanner to work on it. So if the cards magnetic swipe has been worn a bit, putting a plastic bag over it increases the thickness so that the machine can read it. Sort of how you can have a scratched cd ground down, but only have it done once or twice. After that the cd player cant play it.

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