Okay, sitting here just a thinking about what went wrong and it suddenly occurred to me that the reason the damned cats aren’t printing is because the coupons DON’T SCAN!  Not one coupon scanned and the cashier entered them as .50 vendor coupons manually.  These are the new coupons with only the new bar code and my guess is the Jewel registers, for the most part, aren’t programmed to read them.  And somehow when you enter the coupons manually it screws up the total.  That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it!

Had read that there were problems with the two catalinas printing out today so headed over to Jewel to check it out.  I first ran a transaction of seven Cool Touch cubes – a $2 cat and a $3 cat printed.  I hadn’t used coupons because it was just a test, so my next run was using seven coupons:  Only the $2 cat printed.  Hmmm, well, I could either stick around and try to figure out what was going on…but why bother?

I ran four transactions of seven Cool Touch with no coupons and paid with a Jewel gift card.  Walked over to customer service and turned in my receipts and coupons and had them added back to my gift card.  Easy peasy solution and the best part is that you can run this at SCOT all by your lonesome, since no cashier intervention is necessary.  One thing to remember when using a gift card or credit/debit card is that running identical transactions is a fraud trigger and will freeze up your card.  My advice is to throw a penny or nickel into the machine to change the amount you are charging.

For those of you worried about your store having sufficient stock (you need seven for each run), Lisle Jewel has no problems with us clearing their shelves – they also have pallets coming in Tuesday evening (those’ll be up by 8 am Wed.).