As I mentioned prior, I worked at four stores other than my own this week, which has shown me just how bad the video store rental experience can be when you have a severe lack of intelligent, store-conscious employees at an individual store other than your own.

Tonights story: The Perils of Pirates of the Caribbean.

I had a customer approach me, as the manager on duty, at the store which is currently in the process of getting a new manager, because the old one made the PHB from Dilbert look downright competent.

The customer had a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD case, as well as a receipt, and handed both to me, while asking where the discs were. I opened the case and noted that in fact there were no DVDs inside.

Of course, in inspecting the lack of DVDs, I also noticed that there was no price sticker on the cover, no signs of cellophane having been ripped off, nor traces of that annoying sticker that goes on the edge that many people just end up leaving there.

The other thing that struck me odd was the fact that the customer had purchased the movie this morning, according to the receipt, when I knew that this store had been sold out of the movie for a week now and was unlikely to have gotten some more so soon after Christmas, due to the lack of internal inventory shipping on those days.

I politely asked the customer where he had gotten the DVD from in the store, and as I had suspected, he pointed directly over to the “New Releases” rental wall, where all the rental copies of Pirates were, behind empty cover boxes.

It turns out that the untrained monkey of a manager who had worked the morning shift, who should have known the store was out of POTC, and also should have immediately noticed the lack of retail price stickers and cellophane, had cheefully sold this poor soul one of the empty cases that the unknowing customer had assumed were regular copies for sale.

I aplogized for the error, explained that those were all rental copies, despite this being pretty self-evident, refunded his money and put a free rental on his account for his trouble.

… and then I decided that I needed to start drinking on the job.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2003 at 1:49 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.