Shop staff don't know how to use lottery terminal

[TunaMayoP]

It was my birthday last week and got some scratch cards in a couple of cards, yesterday evening I visited the Tesco Express just before 7pm to cash them in. I kept leaving them at home. The 3 members of staff - one of a manager didn't know how to use the lottery terminal. This is very stupid of Tesco in not training all their staff in using it. Especially in my days of working at a supermarket, got a surge of customers coming in 30-40 mins before the game closed at 7:30pm. Especially when the Euromillions jackpot is over £100m

Well it isn’t ideal but I doubt it makes them much money.

Yes YABU. You've no idea how their staffing situation went that night and someone may have been off sick or had to leave. Things happen.

It's really easy to buy your tickets online.

Also from my time of working in a supermarket not all staff are trained for the kiosk and lottery machine. Many just operate the tills and therefore when going into kiosk won't know lottery/returns etc.

OMG this is taking me back 😂

My first job was working on the tills at a Coop. I called in sick one day with the flu, and the only other people working (one other also called out) normally stacked shelves/were new. I spent most of the evening on the phone spluttering down instructions on the lotto terminal and how to process a refund (yes retail is a mess).

If you read my op, I was given scratch cards in my birthday cards. I usually buy tickets online myself as win anything large, goes to my bank account

What was the relevance of “I kept leaving them at home”?

These are scratch cards that you can cash in at any time? You say the Euromillions draw closed at 19:30 and you were aware of this? Deciding to cash them in at 19:00 was a really silly time to do it. Why not go back at a quieter time? You can't have needed the money desperately or you wouldn't have kept leaving the cards at home.

If it was scratch cards, did it need to be before the draw though? So it taking time wasn’t relevant.

Bit of a non issue really, go to another shop or come back at a different time? Yes mildly annoying but more of a shrug it off situation

I'd be amazed if the manager was still there at 7pm, it's unheard of when working in express.

It's not an ideal situation but sometimes shit happens. I usually tell staff to say the machine is down if we've ever had this problem, the health lottery machine was a nightmare and only 2 people knew how to use it so unless they were in the machine was 'broken'.

YABU sorry, but whilst irritating for you, you were cashing in some scratchcards which you can do whenever you like. I'd imagine their evening was a lot worse than yours and they were probably getting continuous grief about lottery anyway. Retail is run on minimal staff these days and it only takes 1 person off to have a big impact on the service offered to customers. Blame the need for profits to increase to keep shareholders happy.
YANBU to expect that a manager would know how to use the machine, but sadly in retail a lot of managers are actually very unaware of what happens on shop floor and have never used things like the lottery terminal. If you are that annoyed you could complain to Tesco that the management were poorly trained.

I suspect that they know how to use the machine to sell tickets, but not to process scratchcard wins - lots of staff have partial knowledge like this, even though the lottery people like to think everyone is fully trained. Also, the lottery was recently taken over by someone other than Camelot (Allwyn??), and they are rolling out new machines, so this may have something to do with it.

You can cash in scratch cards any time, within 180 days of the game closure - either when the last top prize is claimed or with their Xmas themed cards, they close them about 4 days before Christmas. When a game is closed, shops can still sell the remains of the pack in their card display, not activate anymore.

This was my days working in retail.

Good grief

Allwyn have delayed the rollout of the new machines from what a friend told me. New shops opening up are getting refurbed machines.

There's so many glitches with the machines especially with paying out. Our crashes when you try to pay out scratch cards & has to be reset etc. There's only a couple of people who know the password & log in to restart it.
Allwyn made a lot of promises when they took on the contract from Camelot. I'd direct your issue to allwyn rather than tesco tbh.

@Serencwtch when I worked in the shop, we had the sign on details in a couple of hidden places in the kiosk. Everyone who works in the kiosk should know what the sign on details are.

That was allowed before allwyn took over but you would now lose your machine for sharing logins between managers.

Gambling should be banned in all public spaces and shops, no exceptions.