The Price Checker

We went to Kohl’s to look at clearance items recently. Grump got me a $35 gift certificate for there for Mother’s Day and I’ll only use it during good sales. Anyway, we found some really interesting "As Seen on TV" things and wanted to know how much they cost. Well, there was the list they put on the little card above the shelving, but most of the stuff wasn’t on the list, so we had to search out a lady to help us. She’d bring along one of those handheld POS systems, scan the barcode and tell us what we needed to know. I kept saying to myself "Wouldn’t this be easier if they had a price check point?" I was incredibly frustrated by the entire mess and decided not to use my gift card that day (I’ll wait for their early bird sale).

Guess what? As we were leaving we passed a price check point. I was so mad at both myself and the store policy because, honestly, the lady probably could have saved us all a lot of time and grief if she’d just pointed us to that terminal. I would have been ecstatic to use it instead of keeping her from her work. And I probably would have purchased something instead of leaving frustrated.

Remember when all the major stores had those things? I remember when I first discovered them—I think it was at Wally World—and I was thrilled to play. I found the prices of everything I could get my hands on. Then they became so common place that I expected to be able to use it whenever I wanted, instead of hunting down a price check lady or going to customer service like we used to have to do. It saved so much time and aggravation when something didn’t have a tag. And then the stores had this hare-brained idea that they were going to do away with the normal tagging system and make all pricing a whole new language. Once again those POS systems came in handy. And now they’re doing away with the price checkers, but keeping the crazy “special” tagging systems.

It’s a real headache. I was glad to see that Kohl’s does have one, but was irritated because I didn’t know about it right away. And I wish that every store I went into had one that is visible and apparent and that will save me the time and aggravation of finding someone to translate the pricing system of their respective stores. I long for the price checker to come back into action.