“What did you just do?” the checkout person said to me. She sounded confused.
“Huh?” I said. “Used my watch.”
With that, a comical situation ensued as the checkout person at this particular retailer — doesn’t matter which one — it wasn’t in the automotive aftermarket, but these days, it could have been — tried to understand how I could have paid for something with my watch.
The “what” that I just did was use my Apple Watch near the contactless payment system that had been recently installed at this retailer’s checkout. Mind you, there are signs plastered as soon as you enter the store, “mobile payments are here” with credit card company logos and that image that tell consumers that the store you’re about to enter has the ability to take payments from watches and phones.
While it’s kind of cool to use your watch to pay for something, it’s not the biggest reason I take advantage of it. It’s because I don’t have to dig my wallet out of my pocket, take the chip credit card out of its RFID sleeve and insert the card into the slot and wait for an extended period of time. Many retailers report a lag time of up to 60 seconds to process a chip card payment. I don’t care where I save my minute. A minute is a minute is a minute and they add up quickly. So, if I can avoid using a chip card, I’ll do it.
But regardless if I was using my Apple Watch this day, the checkout person demanded to know what was going on. I’ll tell you the short version: The checkout person wasn’t trained. If a store of any kind is getting a new payment system that is based on mobile device payments and someone tries to use a mobile device and that throws the entire situation out of whack while the employee tries to understand what just happened, they didn’t receive the training they needed.
Do you know how I knew?
“What did you just do?” was quickly followed up by, “I’ve never seen that before.”
Exactly. That should never happen. If an asteroid flies by the store, blinding everyone with its light and destroys a forest nearby, erupting into flames, that’s the appropriate time to say, “I’ve never seen that before.”
But if I know more than an employee at a retailer about how their payment system works, the training has fallen short.
I supposed I should invoice the retailer for the on-the-job training I just provided.
