My Costco fun this morning
:
I was pulling into the parking lot at 9:55. The officially open at 10. But.. I forgot their "we might choose to open early if there are a lot of people here" policy. The parking lot was probably 90% full already.
I just wanted to purchase a Costco gift card. I was sent, by friendly and trying-to-be-helpful employees to:
- The card kiosk in the "middle" of the store ("though they might have moved it, but I don't know where"). But... no kiosk to be found.
- The membership service desk. A little bit of a line. But fortunately I overhead the person at the head of the line ask for gift cards "oh, you need to go to merchandise pickup". Hearing that, I - along with 1 other person who also heard what was said, left that line and headed to the merchandise pickup area.
- The registers. No one is at merchandise pickup. We ask a passing employee. "Oh, any of the registers sell them." "Thanks... but none us are buying anything else. And look at those lines." Oh - okay, I radio for someone to come help you."
An employee comes over, with someone needing merchandise. However, after she gets the merchandise, she sees the three of us waiting to buy gift cards. "Oh, I don't know how to do that". Fortunately, a few seconds later, another employee comes by, and shows her how. Okay, 1 customer down, 2 to go.
However... she forgets the sequence of steps, and I was not paying attention. Time for another short wait for an employee to go thru the steps ago. 2 customers down, 1 to go.
My turn, and she gets the steps out of sequence. Fortunately i observed the second time. "I think you have to do foo then fee, not fee then foo". It works. Success! She profusely thanks me for my patience. No worries, I told her, I know there's a lot of stress right now, I am retired and patient, and I got some steps in. I made her laugh, which was nice.
Then out to the parking lot. It is worse. Based on the songs played during my exit journey, it took about 27 minutes to get out of the parking lot. You had people waiting for spots to free up, people trying to exit spots but had to back into the exit line, people trying to merge from the parking lanes into the exit line, 2 exit lines merging about 100 feet from the exit... but in all that time, I did not hear one car horn honk. People were properly alternate merging, when a car had to back out space was made in the exit line to allow them, etc.
So, not a peeve, more an interesting adventure
.