Customer demands to charge her phone at supermarket

[Jdot]

She came into the supermarket wanted to pay for her shopping on Apple Pay but her phone is dead. I saw her talking on the phone in the store.

Supermarkets and other places that people pay for products and services - restaurants, retailers, leisure places etc are NOT responsible for people’s mobile batteries and them not carrying their physical cards on them.

It's not to do with cost, it's to do with electrical safety.
The biggest cause of fire in retail shops is now charging devices.

Anything that needs to be charged has to be risk assessed & the charger tested.

Yes, we weren't allowed to charge our phones at work as our chargers hadn't been PAT tested.

If she rudely demanded then YANBU. If she asked politely then I don’t see the problem.

Thin end of the wedge? And where would they charge it? Would they have to go into private staff areas? It's not a facility provided so a real cheek to ask and a distraction to staff who have actual jobs to do.

"Safety implications"? Oh, come on!

A little compassion maybe, but don't make women into poor, cowed creatures who daren't go out in public without a phone even to just travel home from the shops.

Safety implications!!!

Theres potentially 2 issues with this though.

First being that the store probably wouldn't be covered by their public liability insurance or by their fire insurance (electrocution, or fire started by a faulty phone etc, no matter how small the likelihood of either happening the store probably won't want to take the risk).

Plus also where do you draw the line. You allow one customer to charge their phone in order to pay for their shopping, then the next wants to charge theirs to make an emergency call, somebody else as their Ring Doorbell is going off and they were burgled recently so are worried. Before you know it oyu have customers plugging phones in left, right and centre.

Rather redundant with wireless charging.

That all becomes irrelevant if it increases profits.

I’m pretty sure I can make it to the supermarket and back without a phone …

Re the PAT testing - how do coffee places get around this then, customers often charge laptops phones etc there, they aren't told not to?

Well, I would point them to where the power banks are sold, they usually have a bit of charge on them when you buy them, so plug the phone into the power bank and pay for it and the shopping. Win win .

As for the safety implications, while I don’t think my mobile phone will keep me safe, I do have a charger which is big and heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death with in the event of an attack 😂

My hair salon has USB charging points next to the mirrors as well as sockets for dryers etc. Presumably they are for customer use though I’ve never needed to yet!

And she would have paid for this power bank how?

My wireless charger plugs in

Indeed, not to mention the loss of profit from the sale which I'm sure would more than cover five minutes of electricity to give this woman enough charge to pay her grocery bill.

Me too. I have an Anker power bank that is small enough to take out with me for emergency charging. That said, I never use my phone to pay for things anyway.

We had this, if you were employed when testing happened once a year if you left a charger out he’d check it. I once left my personsl lap top on my desk and he checked that too.

To my way of thinking, it is the equivalent of going shopping and forgetting your purse. People need to take ownership of their actions, and the consequences.

Planning, punctuality, patience.

But skills which are not used fade over time.
People rely on their phones now and normally they are very reliable so they rarely have a backup. Maybe the phone call was long, urgent and unexpected. I think OP is a bit uncharitable

That's a business decision and as such will have periodic testing on safety.

I think that the store charging the phone for here, briefly, is probably the best resolution to the problem. The issue though is if she comes steaming in demanding that they do it. She is the one who filled her trolley with no means to pay, so is in no position to be rude and make demands.

If she approached me on a customer service desk, contrite at her own fuck up, I would of course charge her phone for her. But if she was rude, and demanding, and presented it like it was my problem to solve? Well I'd probably do it to save more hassle, but I'd love to think I'd dream up some health and safety reason for her to get to fuck as a lesson for being not just disorganised, but shitty with it.

Southern trains have heard so many lies from fare dodgers (thieves by another name) that they advertise that there is one excuse/lie that you cannot use.

Every shop I have worked in has a sign, blanket policy that no chargers can be plugged in as everything electrical needs to be PAT-tested. Exactly the same for boyfriend who works in a warehouse.

I was referring to the wireless chargers that some coffee shops provide. Not bring your own. (which would rather defeat the object of having a wireless device.)