Friday, October 19, 2007

$180 Burritos

I'm officially *not* a fan of standalone ATM card swipers at restaurants.

What pushed me over the edge? Paying $180.80 for burritos.

Some places, like the Arby's down the street here have the integrated card readers. It's built right into the register. The kid takes the card, swipes it, and gives it back.

But we have some of these joints with two cash registers and they share the ATM reader. So the kid has to manually punch in the amount.

So the girl at the local Mexican joint keyed in $18.08 as $180.80. When I pointed out the error, I asked for a refund, so she reached into the till and started pulling out cash. Woah, woah, woah! I want that on my card. But she couldn't figure out how to do that! Yikes! Fortunately I had a bank branch across the street so I took the cash and immediately deposited it.

But still!

And it happened to me just two weeks ago. The fine young man working at Taco John's couldn't figure out his card reader. This after he was daydreaming and never saw us even come in the place to begin with. It was stellar. Apparently their ATM swiper runs through a phone line. Not even a dedicated line. So he kept yelling in the back "who's on the phone!? I gotta use the thing"

So he kept swiping my card, and swiping my card. I looked at the receipt he gave me, and it was accurate, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

Until my bank statement came and showed two identical charges at that Taco John's. Doh!

3 comments:

Becky Laswell said...

That is so lame. Was Taco Bell able to do anything about the duplicate charges? Or, can you contact the bank, maybe?

Anonymous said...

Putting technology in the hands of the imbeciles who work retail is a BAD idea. If I can choose an option with no human interaction (and thereby limit the ability of anybody but me to screw up), I always do so.

Steve said...

I'm going to contact the bank about the double charge. I filled out a web comment form, and got a generic response that they cared about my concern and would get back to me soon. And that was two weeks ago, so go figure.