CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--I walked into Fry's Electronics in Manhattan Beach on Saturday afternoon. My first clue that something was amiss was that the parking lot was nearly empty.
Unlike in the past, there was no need to wander up and down the lanes looking for somebody pulling out. Was the store closed? Nope. And although I walked in wearing a knapsack, there was nobody at the entrance to check on me. When I went to the Apple aisle to look for an adaptor, I found that the shelves were nearly empty. A walk through the store revealed that there were maybe half a dozen customers (in a place that often has them by the hundreds) and only a few salespeople, and there were bare patches on the shelves all over the store. (President Trump promoting businesses he owns, using taxpayer dollars.)
A brief chat with one of the salespeople led to the suggestion that they were waiting for a new set of vendors sometime in the future. The opinion of the staff is that the tariff war with China is hindering all levels of the supply chain and store sales.
I leave the resolution of this question to the professional business writers, but there was something eerie about a place that is often a real trial just to find parking, and which often had customers in a long line waiting to get to one of half a dozen cashiers. Maybe the customers anticipated the problems that the tariff war would bring, and did their buying in advance? It doesn't seem likely -- there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that business was wonderful in response to Trump's original threats. Another possibility is that people have been holding back on purchasing consumer electronics out of a desire not to feel like suckers.
I have no doubt that Amazon and other big box stores are cutting into Fry's original position in electronic sales, but that has been going on for years, and this change is fairly recent.
In any case, electronic sales in Manhattan Beach were on a par with soybean sales in the midwest this week.
One exception
Perhaps not so weird, but strange to these eyes nevertheless: Across the alley from Fry's is the Apple Store. (Hint to Apple: Explain on your website how to find the store from the parking lot.) When I managed to find the place, it was like a movie about New York City on Black Friday. There was actually a line in front of the store, and the inside was absolutely packed with people.
OK, you guessed it -- the new iPhone is out. They seem to be up to number eleven, and apparently there are people who just have to have it Right Now.
Now here's the technical difference between Fry's and the Apple Store as discovered by your dedicated detective here. There doesn't seem to be a regular cashier in the Apple store. When I walked over to the shelves containing the adaptors (I was looking for a plug to be used at the neighborhood council congress on Saturday) some nice lady walked over and asked if I needed help. She looked up my request and then walked me over to another specialist to make sure we had the right item. Then she took my credit card and ran it through some adaptor on her own iPhone. Then she walked me over to an adjacent counter to get the printed receipt for me.
It was a demonstration that Apple can do things differently, even at this otherwise mundane level.
I did ask her a question: "Why aren't you being rude like the descriptions in Yelp?" She chuckled. She figured that for a store which serves thousands of people over the course of a month, there are likely to be a couple or three with a grudge about something. Considering the size of the crowd, the exercise was painless to me.
Meanwhile, in the fast food kingdom . . .
This little account will involve an unidentified store manager. It involves one of the rudest, most abusive encounters I have ever experienced. I might as well admit that it was a Jack in the Box in San Pedro and it is my own experience I'm talking about here.
I was coming home the other night and stopped at the drive-through for a late snack. Jack in the Box sells something called a Jumbo Jack for $2.19 if I recall correctly. The price is plainly given on the sign. I asked for one along with a chicken sandwich. Not surprisingly, I was invited to add things to the order. Did I want the combo or just the sandwich? Did I want cheese on the burger? This is the upsell, a standard technique in the fast food industry. It's not against the law, but it would be nice (courteous too) if they would let you say No just the one time and get on with doing your order.
I repeated myself a couple of times: "No cheese." when I got to the window and handed over a ten, the lady asked me once again whether I was having cheese on the burger. This was strange, because they don't usually continue the upsell at the window. I repeated myself -- two more times, just to make things completely clear -- no cheese. The cashier told me it would be four dollars and something for my burger and the chicken sandwich.
When I got to the end of the driveway, I looked at the receipt and, sure enough, I had been charged for cheese. It's not a big loss in the greater scheme of life, but it was irritating to be cheated that way. I'll leave it to the more legally minded to determine whether this was bait and switch or just simple obtuseness.
So, I parked the car, took the bag and receipt inside, and told the other cashier that I had asked for a plain burger and had been charged for the cheese, in spite of my four attempts to say No.
At his point, another woman, possibly some sort of manager, came over and looked at the receipt. She explained to me that I had told the other lady at the drive-through window that I wanted cheese. I told her that I had told them not just once, but four times that this wasn't what I wanted.
Then it happened.
In an attempt to provide the "manager" person a little room for saving face, I suggested that perhaps she had misheard or misunderstood what I had said. She then replied, "My hearing is perfect."
In effect, I was being called a liar by a person who wasn't even the drive-through cashier! How could she even know what I had said, yet here she was, handing out her statement as if it had been carved by lightning into tablets of stone.
She seemed to be willing to refund my money and take back the bag of food. The "manager" even told me I could take the money and keep the food because, "We would just throw it away." I chose to take the difference between cheese and no cheese, handed her back the remaining bills she had given me, and took the bag with my hard-won cheeseburger.
What was missing from this interaction was any offer by the "manager" of an apology. Instead, what I experienced was a work environment that pivoted on a dime into hostility towards the customers, not to mention the untrue imputation of dishonesty on our part.
The loss of my business isn't going to harm this mega-business, but I wanted to share with you what my experience was. From reading internet comments, it is obvious that others have had somewhat similar experiences.
There is a broader lesson here, which involves the way that modern corporations treat their employees like dirt, which results in the employees not caring much about customer relations and, on occasion, getting downright nasty.
UkraineGate
Borrowing from Kevin Drum regarding Trump's attempt to extort political dirty tricks out of the Ukraine government in exchange for $250 million in arms:
"It’s pretty clear at this point that Trump realizes the truth of what happened is likely to come out. So, he’s doing what he usually does: preemptively declaring that there’s nothing wrong with it and getting the entire conservative machine to publicly agree with him. I don’t know if it will work, but if Trump did what we all think he did, then he must be impeached. It doesn’t matter if it’s politically helpful or not. It doesn’t matter if the Senate is likely to convict. It has to be done, and Republicans have to be put on the record as either approving or disapproving of his conduct."
Kevin is a pretty cool head when it comes to politics, so the fact that he is coming around to saying that impeachment is necessary is telling. Note his phrasing: "It has to be done." There is a compelling argument that presidents should avoid putting their own dishonest partisan goals above the national interest when dealing with foreign countries. There isn't a lot of gray area in this one.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
