RealityPrime

I usually love Costco. I’ve been a member for close to 10 years in various states and found them to be a very well run company. But yesterday makes me really wonder if their employee training has gone to shit.

Here’s the scene. My wife and I are checking out with over $300 worth of stuff. Our 2 year old son is sitting in the cart, in the built-in child seat, still strapped in. We normally leave him in the cart during checkout and he’s generally happy. We can always get to him quickly if otherwise.

The checkout woman, a young over-eager type, apparently uses the "extra cart" technique to load checked items into. I’ve seen it before, and it’s frankly silly IMO when there are heavy items to cross-load, as was the case with us. She’s just going to hurt herself over time.

She quickly, forcefully spins the spare cart around and casts it out in front of the register area. Our son being in the next cart apparently disrupts her routine, as she can’t transfer him from cart-to-cart as easily. So she scans all of the heavy items left in our cart (the smaller ones are on the conveyor belt already) and turns my son’s cart towards the re-loading area, but not all of the way. She starts scanning smaller items from the conveyor belt and leaves my son — in the cart — out of reach.

Seeing what she did with the previous cart, I step in to the "area" to gently move my son’s cart the additional 4-5 feet to the end so I can start loading items while she scans, as I’ve done many times before (if she had a 2nd person helping her, I wouldn’t have bothered).

At this point she literally yells at me, "what are you doing?!"

"I’m moving the cart to load it," I say.

"This is an employee-only area," she yells. "Customers need to stay on that side of the register."

I look at my son alone in the cart. "I’m just helping out. You’re being incredibly rude."

"This area is dangerous," she continues scolding me. "Carts are always flying and customers could get hurt."

–only if the employees "fly" them, I think to myself. The register next to hers isn’t even open, so it’s just her alone. And if the area is really so dangerous, she probably should ask us to not to leave our children in the freakin’ carts. I’d hope she wasn’t planning to repeat her cart "flying" routine with my son, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

"This must be your first time," she says, faking a smile.

That’s two. I’m already annoyed, so I don’t tell her that I’ve probably been coming to Costco since before she started high school.

"No," I say without smiling, "it’s not." In fact, the checkers almost always appreciate the help.

I joke to my wife about our son, "maybe we should take him out of the cart now. You never know when stuff is going to fly."

But my wife is livid — stunned is more like it. As I finish paying, she goes off to find the manager to complain, only to be passed through three different people, none of whom seem to have the slightest interest in customer concerns. The last one, the actual manager, tells her to fill out an index-card customer satisfaction form to lodge her complaint.

"No thanks," she says, as we walk out.

And all this after Costco just lost a class action lawsuit that showed the company was systematically abusing their customers during renewals. My wife and I had just upgraded our membership, but I’m thinking now of a permanent downgrade. Costco clearly doesn’t take customer satisfaction seriously — or professionalism for that matter.

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