Worst experience at Harris Teeter ever!
We normally shop here as regular customers and Instacart shoppers as well as other Harris teeter locations. What happened tonight changed our perspective of this store.
We were shopping for Instacart tonight and had a prepaid barcode which the cashier scanned before scanning all the items. The cashier named Jeni (who has been serving Harris teeter since 2021, as per her name tag) showed a lack of knowledge on how to properly checkout an Instacart shopper. After she scanned all the items, she asked for a form of payment for which we had already advised her was the barcode she scanned in the beginning and that should have taken care of the payment as well. She kept asking for two different bar codes to scan as well as to swipe a card. We had to keep explaining to her that the form of payment was only barcode she scanned because it was an online order that was already prepaid. She then proceeded to show unprofessional behavior by escalating the situation and suspending the whole order. She wanted to restart the transaction by rescanning the code which doesn't work twice. She started arguing and started getting hysterical. She finally called another employee to come and review what she had done. This employee named Yeme noticed right away that her colleague didn't start the transaction correctly. She showed knowledge and respect towards the situation. We kept patiently waiting in silence while Jeni kept trying to finalize the transaction the wrong way.
As she stood in front of us she kept mumbling things under her breath while we were trying to contact Instacart customer service so they could reactivate the code. Jeni left us without telling us where she was going and then Ms. Yeme got called to help another customer in the self checkout. Jeni then appeared with some man that didn't introduce himself. He came with an angry temper and she then proceeded to tell him how she didn't want to let us walk away with stuff that we hadn't paid for (Keep in mind we weren't shopping for ourselves, we were shopping for Instacart and at no point we wanted to walk away with anything. She made it sound like we wanted to steal things).
He then told her that this was the computer that "always" gets frozen and that she will have to use another computer until we fix our issue. I proceeded to ask to speak to a manager because she was already wasting our time. Then she said he is the manager, Menur. The manager didn't try to help us or Jeni who clearly had no idea what she was doing. The manager told Jeni she had to put everything to the side until we could pay for the stuff. Jeni grabbed the cart and told us "you're going to have to reshop for everything" while pulling the cart away, to which we asked her to not put things back because we were just waiting for IT to reactivate the bar code. The manager rudely told us we had to pay for the items or we couldn't leave and then walked away straight to his office.
Jeni kept walking away and mumbling things about the situation trying to get us to react. She kept talking behind us to other employees while there were other customers around. This was very unprofessional of her to treat her customers this way. We finally got the barcode reactivated and went back to ask for help. Jeni refused to help us and sent Yeme to help us. We were honestly happy Yeme came to help us instead. The whole transaction went very smoothly with her. She was very kind and professional the whole time she tried to assist Jeni and also when she checked us out.
I noticed Ms. Yeme has been serving Harris teeter since 2022... She has less time working there than Jeni yet she was more knowledgeable and showed leadership skills when she tried to apologize for the whole situation even though it wasn't her fault. She showed patience, respect, and compassion. She clearly tried to put Harris Teeter in good standing.
Then, towards the end of the transaction, Jeni tried to apologize for what happened. I then told her she should have handled it differently and should have asked for help from the begining. She then said that we were "nasty" and we could have been a little nicer ourselves. I think we were nice as we patiently waited in silence.
I hope there is some corrective action and retraining to the cashier Jeni, as well as the manager in shift, Menur. I really hope this doesn't happen to anyone else, especially Instacart shoppers because this takes time out of their earnings. This should have taken no more than 20 minutes but we were stuck there over 40 minutes because of Jeni's ineptitude.
The only reason I'm giving this post one star is because of Ms. Yeme, she deserves a five start rating for her excellent customer service. The whole store situation with the manager and Jeni deserves a zero star rating.
FYI, this happened tonight April 12th, 2023 at around 9:15-30pm. read more