Ringing people up
Viv’s recent post about her pet peeve got me thinking about something that’s been bugging me a lot lately.
I go out to lunch almost everyday. It’s a nice way to get away from work for an hour. We jump around all throughout the week. Sometimes it’s fast food, sometimes it’s a sitdown place.
Our general selections are usually based on something called scrip. See, the bosslady’s daughter is in gymnastics, and when you’re in a sport or club one of the things you have to do is participate in fundraisers. In order for the gymnastics place to maintain its non-profit or whatever-tax-status-you-call-it that it enjoys, 50% of the money it raises HAS to come from fundraising. Which means that each kid that goes there must raise funds via fundraising. You can’t just have rich parents who pay for it; you have to sell stuff. I suppose they can buy the stuff that you have to sell, but it’s not like they can just pay cash to the gym in lieu of you having to do any work.
Of course they do all of the usual fundraising things like selling cookie dough, candles, flowers, etc. But one other thing they do is sell scrip. Scrip is basically gift cards/certificates for all sorts of businesses. A fundraising company buys gift certificates in bulk from businesses at a discount, and then gives some of the proceeds to the people who sell them. So for example, if I was going to KFC, I could buy a $5 gift certificate for exactly $5, and a small portion of that goes to the gymnastics team. Each place is different in how much it gives - anywhere between 3% and 10% of the value of the certificate. But to the end buyer, you’re paying dollar for dollar, so if you were going to go to that place anyway it doesn’t cost you anything and you end up supporting some fundraising in the process. It’s a pretty good system.
What this all means is that we tend to frequent some of the places where they sell gift certificates as script. Two of these places, which I wanted to discuss today, are Burger King and Wendys.
First, Burger King. They used to give paper certificates, but now they give credit card style gift cards. Paper certificates were nice, because they were much easier for the chasiers to ring up. Now with the gift cards you have to swipe them and wait for the machine to come back and tell you how much is left or how much more you owe. Eventually what happens is that you end up with 3 gift cards each with some random $3.72 amount left on them, so you have to start combining gift cards when you buy lunch. This usually requires the cashiers to go find a calculator so they can add everything up right, and it completely slows the ordering process down for everyone behind you.
My other beef is with Wendys. They sell their certificates in $2 denominations, so that means if I spend around $5 for lunch and pay with $6 in script I usually have some change coming back my way. But the problem is that their cash registers (at least, for the local Wendy’s) don’t allow cash refunds for negative balances based on gift certs without manager override. This means that anytime you go and end up paying slightly more with the gift certs than the balance that’s due, they have to hunt down the manager and find their keys. This is only compounded by the fact that we generally have three separate transactions for the three groups of us that go to lunch together; the manager has to be found three separate times. Again, this completely slows everything down for the people behind us.
There’s my venting for the day. Stay tuned for another one coming soon.