Sorry for the rant but there is a question in this one too.
What do you do if a guest tries to use one of those bonus gift cards and it doesn't work and you check it and it says that the card has never been activated but the guest insists that they received it a few weeks ago for buying Tide or something like that and no they don't have the receipt and like today may get ridiculously pissy like it is my fault and that I am the biggest idiot in the world to suggest the possibility that they might have saved the receipt from the transaction that they received the gift card? I only work 16 hours a week but I probably get this at least once or twice a month.
I don't get the impression that they are trying to scam target, the guest today was just particularly rude, but most aren't. They are usually fairly large transactions and $5 off isn't going to make or break target.
Normally if nothing else seems off, I would just give them a 5 dollar coupon to make it right and advise them when they get gift cards in the future just to take 10 seconds to look at the receipt to make sure it was activated. I tried to do this today but the woman started bitching that because Target makes a mistake she shouldn't have to take 5 minutes to look at her receipt and make sure we did our job right. I agreed but told her that it wouldn't take 5 minutes but 10-20 seconds and would save time preventing problems in the future. It also didn't help that she was using this non activated gift card with Cartwheel/wallet and I scanned after hitting total so couldn't go back to add the coupon when I found out the card wouldn't work as another payment. I asked if she had another form of payment besides the redcard in Wallet (this was before things got bad and she said no. I wasn't sure how to get the wallet feature to activate now that I said there was another payment but there wasn't. I should have just put in a cash payment of 1 cent but that's when she started getting mad at me. So, yes of course I had to re-ring everything up. I tried be pleasant and quick about it but everything just made her more upset.
Today with weather, there was not even an option to send her to GS as because of call outs, GS had one person and 3 in line and actually as soon as I finished with that guest I was supposed to go up to relieve the person who was covering GS because the GS was watching the lane because we had no GSA/GSTL for the evening.
So the question is on a normal day with a more pleasant guest if there is no line (or small line) at GS should I send them there or call over a GSTL or just take care of it myself with the $5 coupon. My other option would be to tell them sorry there is nothing on the gift card and let them decide if they want to pursue it further. I could also act dumb like I don't know why the card isn't working and tell them they have to call the number on the card for information.
I know there is 4 possible reasons for the problem.
1. The guest is lying and/or scamming.
2. The guest received 2 stacked gift cards and one was loaded and the other wasn't but the guest didn't realize that and used the good one but saw the other one in wallet and assumed it was good too.
3. The cashier scanning the gift card did something wrong -because we have a lot of new cashiers who are sent off on there own after less than an hour of "training" and are too afraid to speak up if they have trouble with something- like activating the gift card. I would assume this would be more likely to happen with coupon generated gift cards vs automatic ones due to purchase.
4. The cashier scanned the card properly and then either accidentally or deliberately gave the guest the wrong (empty) gift card.
