20. The battle begins! best buy bills.

At Best Buy customers can pay their credit card bills in store. You can have someone else pay your bill for you if they use cash, but if you want to pay with check you must have a valid photo ID on you or we can’t take it. Last November I had a young woman in her twenties who wanted to pay her mother’s bill with her mother’s check but her mother was not in the store, she was waiting in the car. I told the young women that I was sorry but I could not accept the check unless her mother was present. The woman was upset but went to the car to get her mother, who was very angry about the whole situation and went to a different cashier.

                A month later the same woman came in again to pay for her bill and when the cashier, thankfully not me, asked her for her license she freaked out. She insisted that she did not need to show her ID to pay her bill and demanded to see a manager. Once the manager came over he insisted that we did in fact need an ID so the customer angrily pulled it out, insisting that she would be paying online from now on.

                Now a week or two ago the same woman came in again, apparently deciding not to pay online like she said she would, to pay her bill for the month. She handed me her check and before I could even open my mouth she forcefully stated that an employee told her that she would no longer have to show her ID to pay her bill. I told her that I would have to check with a manager before I could take the check and called on over.

When the manager arrived the woman informed her that she was told she did not need an ID but the manager insisted that she did. The customer got extremely angry and insisted that she had talked to a red haired manager a few weeks before who told her she did not need one. The problem is that we have no red haired managers at best buy, the only red heads we have are employees.

When my manager told the customer this she insisted that it was in fact a manager, and she wanted to speak to him immediately. My manager said again that whoever she had talked to was not a manager so the customer demanded to speak to our general manager instead. He was not in the store at the time and in the end we told her that the GM, named Darin, would call her the next time he was working and took down her phone number. As soon as she heard the name Darin she insisted that he was the manager who had told her she would no longer need an ID, but Darin looks nothing like the original employee she had described to us, and she could not name the employee until we had said Darin’s name. After that the customer paid her bill and left the store. I haven’t seen her since, but I’m sure she will be back soon.