The courtesy desk is in theory the first line of defence for the department associates. Turning away the truly lame people trying to return things with KMart or target price tags still on them.
They’re not supposed to (at least when I was there) make decisions without consulting the electronics department associates. I was one of those.
One night I go up to get our returns and find a small box. THe kind bracelets come in or a pair of ear rings. The little cardboard jobs with a lid. Well I open it up and inside are 6 little computer chips. The kind you’d solder on to a logic board somewhere. No idea what they did.
“what’re these?”
“Computer memory.” the courtesy clerk replies.
“Perhaps for a Radio Shack computer project or a really old, big calculator. Not for anything we sell.”
“they said each one was 1mb of computer memory.”
“well they lied.”
“Can you do anything with them? Put them on the shelf with a UPC?”
“Uh, no”
Blank stare………
“I’ll figure out how to claims them. THanks.”
That wasn’t the only time something like this happenned, that’s a different entry. In the end we just put the little ear ring box of computer chips under the register hoping it’d get lost at some point. We couldn’t claim it, since a claim goes back to the vendor, they’d immediately see that these six little whatevers were not PNY 1mb RAM sticks. By the way, at this time, a 1mb stick of RAM sold for about 50 bucks. Good thing the loss went against the electronics department, we weren’t high shrink or anything