Augury
I had a bit of an angry customer moment today. A public strop.
I needed to get an iTunes gift-card this weekend. I tried buying one at the train station’s newsagent.
The thing about these electronic gift-cards is that, even if you have the physical instantiation of the thing, they’re worthless before subjected to an electronic blessing by the cashier. Unfortunately this card swiping ceremony merely resulted in frowns from the cashier. “Are the iTunes cards still not working?” he asked a colleague. No, apparently not.
A weekend malfunction. These things happen. I’d seen it happen to someone else in another store last year. I’d just assumed the gift-card activation process isn’t very robust to communication failure. Apple are already making mad money, so it’s probably not worth the extra effort making it easier for people to give them more.
I was just a little bit peeved that I’d spent time in the queue holding the impotent gift-card when apparently there was already a known problem. Of course, I don’t make a fuss.
So I try again on Monday. Different station, different branch of the same newsagent. Longer queue.
“We’re not selling the iTunes gift-cards.”
No pretence of running it through the machine. No frowny, apologetic faces. A brutal customer slapdown. The weekend’s iTunes gift-card outage had apparently extended into Monday, but nobody thought to take the cards off the shelves? It was the closest I’ve been to a full-on Hulk-out this quarter.
“Why, when you know you can’t sell them, would you still have them out on display? Why would you actively want to convey the impression you were selling something that you’re unable to?”
And, as I asked the question aloud, a possible – speculative – reason occurred to me. When I’d seen the gift-card activation failure before it was at a branch of a formerly major music retailer. A retailer that not long afterwards collapsed, unable to pay its suppliers.
At the time I didn’t see a gift-card failure portending the store’s collapse. But maybe it was an early sign? Maybe the activation ceremony is as much to protect suppliers from distributers as it is to protect the distributers from thieves. If that’s the case, what does an extended failure period imply about the retail distributer? That they’ve been shut-out by their suppliers?
Sooner or later, someone’s going to get narky after queuing and put together a wild thesis based on nothing but scant evidence and conjecture. Not me though. I’m sure the problems I’ve experienced are just a confluence of technical glitches and piss-poor customer experience management. UK business as usual.
