Taylor Research
I thought the meeting was a sales call. I was unexpectedly whisked away from my work at hand and told to sit and listen to two men (who I thought were from Kodak) present 3 of us corporate types with a lengthy series of scenarios involving image management software and hardware. The scenarios included workflow management of hundreds of thousands of images, batch processing of equally enormous quantities of digital photos, and other image-management dilemmas at a time when digital photography was still relatively new.
I recall few details of these numerous and exhaustive scenarios except that none of them seemed relevant to our work. I did not mean to be rude but the surprise nature of the meeting might have piqued my patience. Maybe I was a little blunt in repeatedly responding to their comments with “Not really useful here.” One of the men did most of the talking whilst his backup colleague stared at me. I thought that that gentleman, mostly silent during the meeting, was showing his salesman face of desperation, longing for me to break from my stolid responses and open up to his company’s glorious product.
On account of what I interpreted as a salesman’s face of desperation I think I lightened up my peppered responses somewhat. I later surmised that this trained research surveyor was probably looking blithely on with no sentiment whatsoever.
The meeting lasted over an hour, and when it ended I and the others might well have forgotten it ever occurred but for this follow-up letter that arrived a couple of weeks later. Included with this thank you note for my “participation in the study” was a check for $50. Only then did I realize that this session was not a sales call but a focus group conducted by the Taylor Research & Consulting Group on behalf of Kodak. Had I understood or been informed of this I would likely have had a better attitude about it, though it still puzzled me as to why market research of this format was conducted in this sort of guerilla way.
In those days I sometimes made a few extra bucks after work by participating in market research studies and focus groups. I would have been more or less happy to be at this focus group (even if it did unexpectedly intrude upon my busy, busy day) had I known what it was.
The surprise payment of $50 reminded me of an incident years earlier at Tower Records. Working the cash register one day I swiped a customer’s Visa card through the credit card machine. Instead of the usual approval code I saw a message instructing me to call a toll-free number. I called that number and found myself talking to someone at Visa who asked me if I had a pair of scissors handy. I said yes, and the woman at Visa instructed me to cut the credit card in half and toss the remains into a trash can, this while the hapless customer stood 3 feet away, watching with not-altogether-surprised bemusement.
Evidently this person was way overdue on his card payments, Visa wanted his card destroyed, and I did that.
To my surprise the conversation with the woman at Visa continued. She asked for my name and mailing address so that Visa could send me a check for $75 — a bounty for taking one of their rogue credit cards out of commission. This occurred in 1991, and at the scandalous salary of $5 an hour this $75 bounty was more money than I made in 2 days of labors at Tower Records.
I never thought that record store cashiers had much opportunity for “tips” or extra income beyond the meager paycheck.
I was similarly surprised years later, at corporate, when the $50 payment from this research group was an unexpected paycheck-topper — one which I imagine might not even be allowed or considered ethical within the corporate walled garden.
Until the Visa-cutting-up incident I did not know that cashiers could receive cash bonuses for cutting up customers’ credit cards. I mentioned the experience to others who worked at Tower Records. One woman said this had happened to her, too. She also claimed her mother came to the store one day with 5 credit cards that she knew were bad. She tried to use each of the cards while her daughter worked the cash register. One after another the message came up to call a toll-free number, and one after another the cashier received a $75 stipend for cutting up her mother’s bad credit cards. Cha-$-Ching!
I do not know if I believe that story, or if it was even told in the spirit of fact or apocryphal fancy, but it introduced the subject of how people got away with ripping off the record store — until they got greedy, that is.
One famous incident involved the receipts which cashiers ripped from the registers and handed to the customers. The opportunity to execute this scam had been rectified by the time I heard about it, so I don’t know what the receipts looked like before (or what surveillance was put in place after) these people did this, but a store manager at the time explained it to me like this: If you look at a typical Tower Records Receipt (like this one from November, 2000) you will see that the bottom portion of the slip of paper contains various numbers, including the store’s Merchant ID, an Authorization Number for credit card transactions, and so on. This information was not printed on the receipt until after the credit card transaction had been authorized. Until the credit card transaction went through this receipt sat in the cash register, with all the items listed, waiting only for the final bit of information to be printed on it.
This attracted the criminal instincts of a cashier at the store. Working with a friend who came to the store looking like a typical customer, the friend would bring dozens of CDs and Laser Discs to the counter, and the cashier would enter each product into the register. The receipt slowly rose up from the register, listing every item, and then the charade began.
The “customer” handed the cashier a credit card, but instead of initiating a transaction the cashier used sleight-of-hand to make it only look like he had swiped the card through the machine. No credit card transaction was even attempted before the cashier pulled the receipt from the register and ripped it off, placing it in the bag of the “customer”, and handing the credit card back to him. This looked every bit like a normal transaction to the untrained eye. The receipt listed every item the “customer” appeared to have purchased, but without the Merchant ID and credit card transaction information the receipt was basically void.
The store’s security guards may have checked the “customer’s” receipt as he left the store, but none seemed to notice the absence of this boilerplate transaction information from the receipt.
After this “purchase” the cashier voided every item he had entered into the register, effectively erasing it altogether. This team of two stole hundreds and hundreds of CDs and Laser Discs this way. I don’t remember how they got caught, but the manager at the store who described the scam to me said “they got greedy,” and that they both went to jail for a long time.
Using a similar technique the cashier was also believed to have stolen cash. A typical receipt for a cash purchase looked like this in 2005 (I don’t know how different these receipts may have looked in the late 1980s, when these scams occurred). In this case the cashier would perform a cash transaction, but he would tear the receipt from the register before the “TOTAL AMOUNT TENDERED” portion of the receipt was printed. The customer would take the receipt and leave, and the cashier would void the transaction and keep the cash. This scam was apparently performed on hapless customers who knew nothing of the ruse, and who seemed not to notice that their truncated receipts had no invoice number or amount of change issued.
