Okay, cool. For those of you who don't know what Fry's is, it's a big-box electronics store headquartered here in Silicon Valley. They mostly sell electronics/computer equipment, but they also sell...everything else. And apparently each store has a theme. Um...yeah. The Fry's closest to us is in Campbell, and its theme is "Ancient Egypt." So like...the computers are all perched on tables that are held up by huge panther sculptures and there are Sphinxes and pyramids all over the place. It's pretty cheesy -- think The Luxor in Las Vegas, just slightly scaled down.
Anyway, we headed on over to the Fry's in Campbell. Ron got his refund. We walked through the store. Ron picked up a day planner with a panda on the cover. I picked up a 20-inch monitor. Ron picked up an iPhone case. I picked up a chair (I currently sit on a $15 chair from Ikea).
Good stuff. We headed on up to the checkout counter. And for some reason it took approximately 45 minutes to check out. Actively checking out, not waiting in line.
Um...yeah.
Here's what happened. First of all, Ron's day planner (which cost about $10) was apparently part of some special shipment. It was sitting on a big display in the front of the store, but apparently it was not "ready to go" -- if you wanted it, you had to go back to the computer section and get someone to print up a special invoice for you, so the people at the front would be able to ring it up. Could the people at the front look at the display (which was literally ten feet from their counter) and ring it up? No. Could the people at the front manually enter in a price? No.
So it took the cashier about 20 minutes to find the planner's location (in the front of the store, ten feet from the desk), determine she could not ring it up, and call over her manager. The manager then explained to us that he had to call the back of the store (the computer section) and get someone from that section to print out a special invoice and bring it to the front of the store. On top of that, we could not ring up the planner with our other items -- it had to be a separate purchase.
Okay, fine, we said. Let's do that.
Well, then we ran into another issue: we wanted to buy the chair, but we couldn't pick it up until tomorrow (we had a small car with us). We asked the manager if this would be okay. Yes, he said, but he would have to charge us for the chair and then, tomorrow, when we came to pick it up, we would have to get a refund for the chair and then purchase it again. I thought that was a weird system but whatever.
So we let the cashier ring up our purchases. But she accidentally rang up our chair with the rest of our purchases, which was a no-no -- the chair had to be rung up separately so we could come return it and then buy it again tomorrow. So the manager voided all of the purchases on the receipt, and rang up the non-chair items, and then rang up the chair.
I asked him why he didn't just void the chair, and then ring up the chair again, and he said he didn't know -- he didn't think of that.
Anyway, long story short: we spent 45 minutes at Fry's while the cashier/manager rang us up a total of five times, voided our purchases three times, and then rang us up for a purchase that we will have to come back tomorrow to void and then ring up again.
Seriously, Fry's?
