But I Needed to Get Home..I Had Frozen Items!

[ralerin]

Here's an idea: Scooter carts with foot or hand pedals kept out front for people to use if they need one and can use their hands or feet to pedal. The ones that have electricity for people who can't do either would be kept behind the register, minimum deposit of $10-20 to use one, returnable once customer returns cart. If they do not, and if they are stupid enough to bring it out of the store, the cart locks up and customer immediately loses deposit.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Here's an idea: Scooter carts with foot or hand pedals kept out front for people to use if they need one and can use their hands or feet to pedal. The ones that have electricity for people who can't do either would be kept behind the register, minimum deposit of $10-20 to use one, returnable once customer returns cart. If they do not, and if they are stupid enough to bring it out of the store, the cart locks up and customer immediately loses deposit.

So if somebody who needs the electric cart comes in and has only ten or twenty dollars to spend, are they supposed to choose between getting groceries and using the cart? That might be an ADA violation.

Dealing with the electric carts sucks, but you have to deal with it.

[Zeddmore]

Turns out the cart boys had seen the customer drive out of the parking lot on the electric cart and start driving down the shoulder of the road and were following her in an effort to retrieve it.

So let me get this straight, was this an honest-to-goodness low-speed cart chase?

[Brojekk]

We have the carts in our store as well. They're also not for outdoor use. Nobody says anything when customers take them outside and leave them near the handicapped parking spots. I often have to drive them back in.
I'm still waiting for an incident to happen that will finally make management crack down on taking them outside.I also know some customers will piss and moan about that,saying "but you always let me do that before".

[RetailSlave]

Yep, they were following her to see where she was taking it, but being teenagers, they were afraid to confront her. They figured they would follow her, then let someone at the store know so they could retrieve it, if they weren't able to just drive it back to the store.
Just two days ago we were missing one of the Amigos and we didn't see it anywhere. We figured that maybe a customer had it in the store. Well, we got a huge thunderstorm and when the weather had calmed a bit (no lightning but still raiing a good bit) my fellow cashier went out with the stock crew for a smoke break. Turns out someone had parked the Amigo all the way over by the cinemas and left it..this was a good 1/8 mile...and it was dead. Our manager went out and pushed it back into the store with the help of another guy. The other cashier knew it had to be charged but was reluctant with it being waterlogged. When she got ahold of the plug water poured out of it..so we just pushed it to the back of the bay and tied a bag over the controls.

[chainedbarista]

while her plight is sympathetic, her solution was not; call the cops, then hire someone to tow it back AT HER EXPENSE.

let her figure out why things turned out the way they did (doubtful, but i can dream).

[Red_Dazes]

That's one of the reasons I love my neighborhood so much. We have a cute little grocery store about 3 blocks down and they have a program that allows you to take a cart with you to bring your groceries back home (since everyone in this place lives very close by) and then bring it back. Everyone is really good about it in this place... It makes me sad to think people could be so rude.

...then again what did I expect really? Look where I am. lol

[Victoria J]

When I was training to do my job I was a volunteer,and was living in a small town. It was a very different experience to being a paid adviser in London. The organisation I was working for was right in the centre of the town and was really the only place people to go if they had a problem - and we had a lot of regular customers.

One of the more interesting was this terrible old lady who we'd see every couple of months, generally because she'd was trying to challenge being banned from one of the shops in the town. I think just about everyone other than ourselves had banned her at some time or other. She was never (in my memory) that bad to us even though very often we did end up unable to help her, and basically telling her it was her own fault. I think she'dhad a couple of official warnings abouther behaviour but nothing so bad we stopped seeing her.

But the most memorable of her complaints was that she also regularly came in claiming that the supermarket Morrisons has "stolen her scooter".

The first time she complained I think someone had actually tried to help her. She claimed that her scooter was parked outside her house. She lived on a road next to the Morrison's car park and one day their workers had come along and just taken her scooter.

I think someone even wrote to Morrisons on her behalf.

I don't think anyone here is going to be that suprised that we discovered that in fact she had stolen the scooter from Morrisons and been outraged (outraged!) that they'd had the nerve to take it back again. She was quite convinced that it was her right to keep the scooter because she needed it and that therefore they had stolen it.

After that every couple of months she'd go along to the supermarket and take their scooter. She'd use it for a few days until they went and took it back from outside her house and then she'd start complaining about them stealing from her. I think she came to us only when the police wouldn't act.

At one point one of our workers had even tried to get her a scooter of her own. They figured if they could get evidence she actually needed one we could get the money for her to buy one, or get extra disability benefits that would pay for it.

The doctor wrote back to say that as far as they were concerned she could walk just fine. While she claimed she couldn't walk there was absolutely no medical evidence that this was the case. It may be that she had a really bad doctor, but it seemed more likely (given everything else) that her problems were entirely mental not physical.

If she's still alive it's probably still going on. She never learned not to just put it outside her door. Morrisons never did anything beyond collecting it again when they got round to it.

Haven't thought about this for years. She only wasn't the most notorious customer when I was training because of the story I was told of the woman who came in every 3 or 4 months to ask "What benefit can I claim if my husband fell of a ladder and died ?". After a couple of years he did die. Not of falling off a ladder, but it was an accidental death and everyone always wondered...

Victoria J