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2:43pm on Tuesday, 3rd March, 2015:

Pay at Pump

Outburst

The Pay at Pump feature they've introduced at Sainsbury's finally brings their petrol station up to the standards of other nearby supermarkets. You can either pay at the pump or go to the kiosk. It would seem fairly obvious that they want you to pay at the pump, because machines are less expensive than the people who occupy the kiosk.

Hmm.

The pump comes with a laser scanner to scan your loyalty card, but this isn't operational. You have to swipe youre card's magnetic strip rather than scan its barcode. OK, so that's not too bad. People will still all use the Pay at Pump facility.

Well, maybe they would if Sainsbury's didn't keep giving out coupons to give you money off your fuel. I had one today that knocked off 10p per litre, which, given that it was only 109.9p per litre in the first place meant I was paying less than a pound a litre. That's expensive by the standards of other parts of the world, but pretty good in Essex. Anyway, to use the coupon I couldn't pay at Pump because it couldn't scan the coupon's barcode. I had to go to the kiosk, where four people were serving the bust queues (from maybe 30 pumps).

This rather undermines the whole concept of Pay at Pump.

Someone doesn't understand the principles of gamification.




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Copyright © 2015 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).