What’s exciting about Julep is that we (almost) never make the same mistake twice. We’re really striving to keep learning – as individuals and as a collective.
But, as a fledging young business, there are a LOT of things we’re doing for the first time. Like the first time the faucet handle fell of the wall (Monday), the first time the sanitizer overflowed (also Monday – and actually, okay, okay, that wasn’t the first time), and the first time we ran out of thermal tape for our credit card machine (today).
We are hopeful (delusional?) that our fabulous services and in-service professionalism radiated a sense of calm that minimized the impact of these aggravations that were driving us (me) batty.
Since we had no credit card paper between about 2:25pm and 3:30pm today, the guests who checked out during that time had to take our word for it that we were charging their cards the right amount . . . . Thank you thank you to the patient guests who had strong senses of both humor and empathy. And thank you for your efforts to preserve the environment by cutting down on excess credit card receipt paper.
So it turns out that it’s only a short 4 transactions from the pink “you’re running out” signal on the paper to the “no paper error” that means that you won’t be able to give your guests any record of this transaction.
And that’s hardly enough time to run across to Office Depot, buy credit card machine paper rolls, get back to the parlor, find out that it’s the wrong paper, run back to Office Depot, return the first rolls but find that they don’t have the type you need, run back to the parlor, get your car keys, drive to OfficeMax, buy 200 rolls of the right paper (so this doesn’t happen again, for a long, long time, anyway), drive back and pop the roll into the machine. Now is it?
I actually resorted to putting the credit card processing machine on the top of the counter for one guest to be able to show her exactly what I was punching in. . . (I thought it was resourceful, I think she thought it was overkill).
Tomorrow, Jeanne will say (accurately) that we need a PROCESS to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And then she will magically make that happen.
And Audrey and Michelle will be excited to be able to close the cash drawer with actual paper records of transactions (making things so much more boring!).
