Electronic Kindness
Comments: 8
After dinner tonight I had to take some video tapes back to the rental store. I should have taken them back yesterday, so they were late and I was going to have to pay extra. As I approached the store I was imagining the clerk waving the scanner over the barcodes stuck to each cassette and the register blinking up the amount I would have to pay.
It suddenly occured to me that this sort of electronic inventory tracking could spell death to a certain sort of human kindness, where the clerk, recognising me as a regular and big-spending customer, decides to waive the late fees just this once for whatever reason (to put us both in a good mood and keep me coming back for more, say). I’d latched onto the idea of electronic systems making certain forms of human behaviour impossible and was thinking of how so many of our inventions seem to make us smaller, seem to limit us rather than augment our behaviour. I’d hand over my late tapes, the clerk would wave the scanner, and we would both play the roles that some programmer somewhere had scripted for us under the direction of the video chain’s accountants.
I was thinking that we really need to build kindness into electronic systems, and that if I was the president of the chain I would instruct the programmers to make sure that there was a button on each customer’s record page labelled “Oh, OK. Just this once!” which clerks could hit every so often when they were in a good mood.
Then I bumped into the father of a girl my daughter goes to school with and we chatted as we stood in the line of people waiting to pay while his daughter watched Episode 2 of Star Wars on a wide-screen TV the store had set up nearby. In my hands were the late tapes plus a couple of John Cassavetes movies I’d pulled off the shelves before heading to the register.
We got to the bank of registers at the same time, him first then me at an adjacent register, and continued chatting as we did our business. He and his daughter said farewell and left the store, then I collected my new rentals and left a moment later.
It was only when I got outside that I realised the clerk had not charged me for the late tapes.
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2003.01.11 (Sat) • 22:38
Comments
Posted by mike g 2003.01.11, 23:52
I wish I’d gone to your rental store. I returned two overdue DVDs today to the local Tsutaya, and made use of one of the few Japanese words that actual springs to my mind in appropriate situations (“takai”) when the clerk asked me for ¥2500 — four time what I originally paid to rent them for a week. I wanted to plead, to beg, to throw a temper-tantrum (there was a blizzard on the day they were due! they weren’t even good movies!), but I quietly and politely paid the piper and even rented another DVD.
I would urge you to forward your “electronic kindness” idea along to Tsutaya.
Posted by jh 2003.01.12, 00:27
Yoicks! Takai yo!
I remember reading somewhere (cannot for the life of me recall where) the exact proportion of the rental video industry’s profits that comes from late fees. It was an astonishing figure — much, much more than you would expect.
Perhaps not so surprising though, Mike.
Posted by Nadeem Bitar 2003.01.12, 01:02
The idea of building flexible software is something i always think about when i am designing customer oriented programs. I do not like software that is fully automated and can’t handle similar situations.
Posted by tomas 2003.01.12, 04:02
I’m not sure what kind of drones you’ve got for clerks over there, but a good system, I think, would display convenient information to aid the clerk to do a good decision, not tell the clerk what to do. “Convenient information” would include how many times and how often you rent tapes, how often they were returned late, how often they were returned in bad shape, maybe some manually entered information, etc.
Now for the real issue, what were you doing renting tapes?
Posted by Mary Beth 2003.01.12, 05:18
Where I am employed, we can override things like required restocking fees, but generally we need to work with a manager to do so. That’s not a bad thing as long as the manager is reasonable. While it’s true that for good customers you would like to make exceptions that would favor both them and the business, the problem is more (from my side of the counter) the customers who demand special treatment. Those are the customers we often wish would never come back because no amount of kind, polite treatment will make having their business a good thing.
Posted by roulston 2003.01.12, 10:40
I think that I’ve had to pay late fees on every single DVD that I’ve ever rented in my life. I just can’t ever seem to get those buggers returned on time. That’s why I prefer to just buy DVDs, because buying them ends up being less expensive than renting them and then getting tagged for 2 or 3 days of late charges.
Posted by Jeff 2003.01.12, 16:52
Interesting you mention this, as I had a similar thought today. I was standing in line at the store, waiting patiently to make an exchange, an elderly woman ahead of me doing the same. She was exchanging one pair of slippers for another - simple enough - but the transaction ended in her owing the store $.02 US. After much searching through her purse, she managed to find two pennies to cover the difference, and on she went.
I thought the whole thing rather silly, but I guess the clerk couldn’t just waive the $.02…the register records and the cash drawer would have to balance at the end of the day, else someone would have to answer for it. Even if it was a mere $.02.
Posted by sitemap 2003.10.17, 01:32
The workers at my local blockbuster were so good about not charging me that I used to stop by with pizzas just to say thanks. They loved it!
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