Busy, Busy!

#2 had a an English presentation to complete at school this morning. The topic is on 'Homeless people". Feedback from the teacher was very encouraging. It was a group effort and each had separate responsibilities to make it a successful presentation. Kudos!

I had to fetch her from school during break time to settle some personal matters and then we went for Japanese lunch at Sushi Zanmai, in One Utama.

There was a Shojikiya outlet there and we browsed around and picked up some stock. For those of you who don't know about Shojikiya, it's like a Japanese sundry shop selling all Japanese imported food stuff.

You can find Miso, dried soba, candies, divine chocolates, frozen food stuff, seaweeds, the whole works! They also have outlets in Hartamas Shopping Centre, Sunway Pyramid, The Gardens and of course One Utama. Some items may cost a little more than that sold in Jusco but they do have promotion on one item per month (not very exciting).

Anyway, theirs is an exclusively Japanese import store and I was quite trilled to find these cute furikake bottles.


Aren't they cute? The one on the left is my favorite, the egg furikake. The one on the right is made of beef. I have never tried that and when I do, I'll blog about it.

I've seen this in some of the Japanese Bento sites and I thought that it was an oshibori container. Now I know it's not! LOL!

We then moved on to Watson's to buy some stuff that #2 needs for Korea. We normally shop at Guardian Pharmacy but we were pressed for time so we opted for Watson's.

Most of the items were on sale which was good for us and when we went to pay at the cash counter the cashier just keyed in the price without knocking off the discount. I asked her (let's call her "A") and she said that the item was not on discount. I replied that the whole range was on discount and she took the item and walked towards the aisle which stocked the item. It WAS on discount. She went back to the cash counter and keyed in the discount.

For all the other items (almost RM200 worth) she did the same thing, walk to and fro the aisle to check if the items were on sale. I asked what was wrong and she replied that the system had a problem and couldn't detect the discount. Okay, fine! I'm cool about that even though I was rushing, I stayed very patient, after all what can you do if the machine decides to act up, right?

All the while there was another cashier ("B") next to her ("A") who was also keying something into her calculator. When the cashier finished walking up and down checking and keying in the items the bill came up to RM196/=. She looks at the other cashier next to her who said RM6/= and she knocked off RM6/= from the total which made it RM190/=. I asked if the discount was only RM6/= and I was told that all the other items were already discounted and the RM6 was not taken into the cash machine.

Okay, so I paid the RM190/=, walked to the next cash counter which was closed and checked through my bill. It actually looked fine until #2 exclaimed that the lip balm that she picked up was RM9+ and not RM12+ as stated in the bill.

I'm quite proud of her because she finally has shown to me what I have been always instilling to them, i.e. not to buy things without looking at the price tag!

Anyway, I went back to tell "B" (because "A" was attending to another customer) that there was a discrepancy in the bill and without responding or looking at me, pulled a long face and roughly took the bill and item from my hand and passed it to "A".

I responded by asking her why she had to be so rude and she just walked away. Wow! The cheek of an employee!

I was quite annoyed and went to look for the Manager. When I related the incident to the Manager, he immediately said that he would reprimand "B". I told him that he should find fault with the management and not with "B" because "B" was probably not provided any training to be behaving the way she did and if the management had provided proper training and being manager he couldn't identify a problematic employee then he should be responsible!

He looked shocked that I should find him and the management responsible. Isn't it their responsibility to employ 'qualified' staff and provide training if they are not properly qualified for the job?

Personally, I think in any incident like this, the management of the company should not point fingers at their staff to shift blame but do the responsible thing, respond, act on the problem and improve.

Well, I've done my part to voice out my grouse and the rest I leave to the manager to deal with. I don't wish to know what they do because if their attitude is to sweep problems under the carpet and pretend it didn't happen, in the long term their financial profits will be affected, especially in this economy slowdown.

As for me, I will probably not return to Watson's because I still have to pay where ever I go and I might as well go some where I don't have to deal with some cash machine with an issue with the system which in turn cause delay and irritate the people who have to punch in the figures and manually work out discounts and have to walk about to check if items are on discount!!! *slaps head in despair!*

Okay! With that irritating issue out of my way, I rushed off to fetch #2 from school and rushed her to her favorite cafe for lunch. While there, I organized her birthday party with the owner. I like this cafe because they have lots of board games, IQ and EQ games. It'll be an interesting change, I hope.

When I got home, I saw two paper bags of clothes packed to be sent to the dry cleaners. Hence, off to the dry cleaners I went. Half of the clothes were the used winter clothes from Hubs trip to Australia (yeah, I've been putting it off) and the other half were #2's clothes for Korea.

It's been a terribly busy day. This post is already too wordy and long. Check out my new bento box in my next post!