Season Greetings?

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the town

Shoppers were scurrying all around.

Lost and confused I must say

Before they knew it they lost another day

Heading south on Route 1 to Scarborough Maine, there is a large sign on the sign that says “Merry Christmas”. Of course, to some this is an offensive sign and to others it is just a sign of the holiday season.

However, a big question comes to mind when seeing this sign: who paid for it and why is it there anyway?

I can’t answer either of these questions, but it does remind me of problems that come up this time of year.

The problem is that not everybody celebrates Christmas or any other holiday this time of year. So realistically, this sign can be very offensive to those who don’t believe in Christmas or anything it represents.

Turning the clock back 25 years, when I worked at the late Woolworth chain, Christmas was everywhere. Santa Claus, Merry Christmas, elves and everything else was all over the store. No other holiday was ever mentioned within the boundaries of the store whatsoever.

There was no mention of Jewish holidays, African holidays, Buddhist holidays or any other holidays during the period. It was like these others didn’t exist. And to Woolworth they didn’t. They never ever existed during the entire existence of the company.

After all, Woolworth was note noted as “America’s Christmas Store”. With a line like that, it was obvious nothing else existed.

It was also expected that employees keep the spirit alive by saying “Merry Christmas” to everyone they waited on and everybody they saw.

Being the Grinch type I was, I always gave my standard ‘thank you” and nothing more. I was one of those who never embraced the holiday of Christmas for many years and to this day still don’t.

Forward the clock to my years at Staples and things were different, much different.

Don’t even think of even mumbling the words “Merry Christmas” to a customer ever or else you would face being reprimanded by the management.

Why?

Not because they were Scrooges, but because like other anal policies, they decided not to do Christmas as a greeting. They preferred instead the more generic “Happy Holidays” if anything.

The important part is the “if anything” as they would prefer no greeting at all to one of any type of celebration at all. Personally, I don’t believe that Staples ever had or ever will have any holiday spirit whatsoever.

However, it seems that now, we are overwhelmed by Christmas/holiday tunes/TV movies/specials/merchandise and everything else earlier and earlier every year.

One local radio station started playing holiday songs at the first of November 24/7.

Target started selling Christmas decorations even before Halloween was over.

Yes, Virginia there is a “War on Christmas” as reported by some news outlets. We start the holiday season earlier and earlier despite that this year is the shortest period between Thanksgiving and Christmas so it is no wonder everybody is starting to hate on the holidays especially Christmas and Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, there is nothing that will change in these modern times. We are too individualized and polarized to be united anymore to celebrate holidays as we did years ago. The ways of Woolworth certainly would not be deemed acceptable today under any circumstances.

Is there are a solution to all this mess? Sadly not a solution is to be found that I can tell.

All we have is the memories of a bygone era.

So now I close the book on another year

Many of you may shed a tear

He is gone you may say

But don’t worry fellow readers I will be back another day

Please note:

This is the last posting for this year. I will return the first week of January with a brand new posting (if all goes well). For you date counters out there, that means approximately 3 weeks from now I will return

Until then, remember have a safe and happy holiday season or if you don’t celebrate the holidays, make one up.

Email Receipts

Have you ever made a small purchase in a store and wound up with a receipt that was several feet long?

Well that exact thing has happened to me recently at a local retailer. It is rather embarrassing to be handed such a long receipt when somebody only buys a couple of items.

So what do you get in all that footage of paper?

· Name of store

· Address of store

· Phone number of store

· Name of manager of store

· Company or store’s email address

· Transaction information (date, time, transaction #, register #, cashier employee # or name, etc.)

· A listing of products that you purchased including any discounts

· Type of payment including any authorization number if it was any form other than cash

· The company’s return policy

· A customer satisfaction survey request including information needed to access either a website or a phone number plus any codes needed to complete the survey

· A friendly closing like “Have a nice day”

Certainly some receipts may even have other things than this including rebate information or coupons for future purchases or other items.

With all this information and the spacing between items, it is easy to get a receipt that could easily be measured in feet not inches.

Now companies like Macy’s has decided to adopt another way to save paper: the email receipt.

While this sounds great on the surface, in reality it is full of red flags and gotchas that they don’t tell you about.

First the good news or not so good news, if you opt for an email receipt only you walk out of the store with no receipt. This works great if you just so happened to walk into another store and the security alarm goes off and you have no receipt. Expect to spend some time with store or mall security without that receipt.

So you save paper then what?

If you are like me, then any number of scenarios could happen.

Here are just some of them:

The cashier types your email address wrong so you never receive the receipt. One wrong character could send your email to the wrong recipient. This could lead to the potential of identity theft especially since the recipient of the email could acquire credit card information from the receipt. Are you listening Google?

The email is sent but ends up in your spam inbox and not your regular inbox. With some email systems, chances are that the email may get deleted before you ever get it. In other words, the email system blocks the email from entering your system because it was predetermined by the email system to be spam.

Your email address is sold to third parties without your consent. By accepting an email receipt, you are probably subjecting yourself to a privacy policy that allows the store to do whatever they want with your email address. Just try asking the cashier what their privacy policy is and expect to get blank stare.

Of course, the worst of all is that you could delete the email by mistake and find out later that you really need that receipt. Good luck if you paid cash.

Overall, I would never give my email address to receive an email receipt. If I don’t have physical receipt in my hand at time of purchase, I would never be happy.

I don’t know of how many stores have started this procedure, but I feel it is dangerous one at best. So far I have seen this at Macy’s only and even lately they have been bypassing this prompt at the register to “paper receipt only”. Maybe they have already had complaints like the ones listed above.

As far as I know to date, Staples has not started any sort of email receipt program or testing any sort of program. Given their past with how they handled my email address with rewards cards, I hope they never even think of this procedure. EVER!

Consider yourself warned…

Black Friday Aftermath

So here we are 5 days after the Black Friday event.

Reports say that spending was down over 13% from last year, but was up about 2% when Thanksgiving Day sales are figured in. This of course, assumes that the stores were open on the holiday. Here in Maine along with Massachusetts and Rhode Island, most stores were closed until at least 12:01am Friday morning.

While I did not join the midnight crowd, I did go out around 11am that day. Here are just a few of my observations:

· It was easy to find a parking space everywhere. Apparently, many have already left most places and called it a day. While I had to sometimes park out a little further than usual, the parking was still plentiful.

· The ads were not great. Nobody had any really great doorbusters and many had just average discounts on many items. Even companies like Staples, which in past years, have had multipage ads; this year was limited to a 4 page ad. In fact, many of the items on sale at Staples were rebate items and not upfront sale prices. Also, on the back page, Staples offered a “buy 1 get 1 50% off on all ink cartridges”. However, in common Staples fashion, the blurb had a footnote attached to it which referred to the nasty small print at the bottom of middle pages. However, Staples definition of “all” as previously noted in a past post doesn’t mean all at all. Both HP & Epson cartridges were excluded from the sale. Nice job, Staples, by once again creating a false advertisement. When will they ever learn?

· Incompetent help was everywhere. Sadly, many of the seasonal associates were not properly trained and lines backed up because of this.

· One Walmart store I visited only had 4 registers open (yes you read that right) out of a possibly 25. This was around the 4pm hour when many people were shopping and the lines were around 20 people deep. To make matters worse, the cashier of the line I was in constantly forgot to give the correct change. She had her purse at the register looking for money to give the customer along with searching her pockets for change as well. Eventually a manager did come and open her drawer after wasting time doing her own personal search for money. In most other stores, this cashier would have been fired for this type of activity, however given that this was Walmart and they were so shorthanded they probably overlooked this problem.

· Poor placement of sales items in stores was another major problem for most of the stores I visited. Items of like types should be together, toys with toys, DVDs with DVDs etc. However, this was not the case as items were spread out all over the stores creating mass chaos as searching for some items was impossible and sometimes not worth the time. I probably would have spent more than I did if I could find what I was looking for. Don’t bother looking for help especially at Walmart and Best Buy as these stores lacked any salespeople on the floor.

Overall, I would say that this year I was underwhelmed by the whole Back Friday event. For a holiday period nearly a week shorter than normal, the stores seemed completely unprepared both staff wise and product wise. I believe that some retailers may have seen their last holiday season this year and that will be the discussion of a post in the very near future.