Places playing dumb about cards and vouchers.

[xr6er]

Over the years I have tried things such as Entertainment Card, Pesidential Card etc.
On more than half the amount of times I've tried to use it, the person behind the counter would give it a dumb look and end up walking around to other staff members asking what it is. It always seemed the longer the queue was behind me the longer they would take. I always got the feeling that they were deliberately stalling to make me get sick of waiting and say "Forget about it I'll just pay the whole amount".
I have recently been buying gift cards from Coles due to the FB offers. I have been buying cards such as Ultimate Gift Card, The Restuarant Gift Card etc. I am starting to have the same problem with staff giving it a dumb look and wasting time walking around asking other staff members about it. I'm curious if this is genuine that they don't know about it, or are they stalling because they lose a % of the sale when using the gift card. Does anyone know if the store/restuartant loses money when someone presents a gift card and hence the reason for stalling.

 

[flyingfan]

My guess is because of the variety of gift cards/credit/charge/loyalty cards out there, staff genuinely don't know what they are, and they're trying to see how it should be processed and honour the rules by asking other staff. I don't think it's stalling because the staff probably don't work on commission or net sales and it's not good customer service for that queue to grow longer.

 

[oz_mark]

My guess is they simply don't know. Much of this stuff is learnt 'on the job'.

 

[Hampton Mike]

I'm currently having a little holiday on the Gold Coast and the cafe near where I am staying is taking my Perfect Gift Card (purchased recently through EDR) and is one of the few not adding a transaction fee to the use of any gift/credit card (but that's probably another topic). But interestingly the use of a gift card crashes their SQUARE system, so they have another parallel system available just for gift cards. Now that's good service!