It's not a fluke if I keep having bad experiences at this Target. Or the corporation in general. Bringing up the issues with the company itself is non-starter. They don't care about customer service after the sale has been done, or return customers. But they sure do have a lot of excuses.
Right after their huge leak of company information I had a huge cold and stopped there out of convenience to get some out-in-the-open, non-prescription, non-sealed case cold medicine. I wouldn't have, due to a bad experience just a week before. I used to go here at least once a week and it was convenient & I was sick and just wanted some medicine & sleep.
Long story short, the cashier scans the stuff & says it's asking for an I.D.
Suffice to say, I am clearly not a teenager. I have the college degree & 401K to prove it. But I respect the efforts to keep drugs out of the hands of kids, as arbitrary as some are, so I held out my I.D. & faced it towards the cashier to see that I was, indeed, well over 18 by decades. To my bleary-headed surprise (I was very sick with a cold, & my reflexes weren't tops), the cashier snapped the card out of my hand and with a quick motion, *boop!* scanned it.
I.
Was.
Shocked.
A huge breach in security at this company and they, without asking for permission, scan my personal data into their filing system? In case you are unaware what is imprinted on the scanner bar on the back of an I.D., it varies by state, but in South Dakota everything from your Social Security number to your address and beyond is imprinted there and was now in the database of a company who'd just had a major information breach.
I was not amused. I asked the cashier why he'd grabbed my card & scanned it and was told it was corporate policy to do so. I am a person who purposefully does not buy things like psudophedrine because I do not want my I.D. in the database of a corporation, so I was bewildered that a simple cough medicine was used to get high. I found out with a quick internet search that some idiots do, by ingesting about 5 bottles at a time for a euphoric experience. I'm sure these kinds of people wouldn't have bothered with the inconvenience of paying since there was no type of security device of any kind on the medicine & it was all sitting out on a shelf.
The issue here is I was not given a choice. Had I known a scan was required, I would have put the item back on the shelf and gone elsewhere. I contacted Target Corporate and the unapologetic answer I was given was that their cashier shouldn't have acted like that, but as far as I saw, the cashier was only doing what the corporation had told him to do. Additionally, they went on to say that it was a legal issue of why they were scanning cards, however my research & experience proved otherwise as I went to two other Rapid businesses that cold season & bought the same medicine without ever being asked to show an I.D. at all. I also learned that this was not an isolated incident by any means and that many people were upset with this & had had Target cashiers forcefully trying to remove their I.D.s from tight-clenched hands, or even telling one of my coworkers that if they handed them their card they promised not to scan it but then immediately did. When I asked a friend who worked there seasonally about it, she confirmed that it was policy for many items, including video games and spirits as well, and the reason the cashiers were scan-happy is that they needed a manager to hand-type in card information and would get admonished if they pulled a manager to the registers for what was considered a time-wasting task. I even had one coworker whose wife had tried to buy a bottle of wine & was refused because the scanning strip would not scan & the cashier refused or was untrained about any way to type in the birthdate of a 55 year old woman which could be clearly read on her I.D.
I feel I was taken advantage of. Simple as that.
And that's just one of the bigger issues I've had.
I don't even want to talk about all the ads and junk mail I get nowadays with information I never gave out that are filling my mailbox.
There are plenty of other places to buy what this unethical big-box store is hocking. I remember the Gambles department store from downtown. It got replaced by these behemoths. One day Target will be replaced by another because there is an increasing amount of people who are going from shopping there once a week to never again. read more
