The Day Before the Day/Night Before Christmas

What’s the most flexible gift? What’s the gift everyone would like? What gift comes in a size that fits everyone? What’s the gift to get when time is running out? The answer to all of the above is the gift card (well, cash isn’t bad either).

So here it is the day before the day/night before Christmas. Marian went out to do the easiest part of her holiday shopping … pick up some gift cards.

Her first stop was St. Louis Bread Company. Oh, a problem. Their central computer server was down, had been down all day, and they didn’t know when it would be up again. Thus, they could not create any gift cards. Marian asked if she could get the old fashioned paper gift cards instead of the things that look like credit cards. Nope. No way to do that. They did offer to take Marian’s money and, when (and if) the system came up again, would generate the requisite gift cards. Marian declined.

Later in the day, she went to Lowe’s. Same result. She was told that about three customers before her, the system went down and they had no way to do gift cards. Paper ones? You gotta be kidding.

Next stop was the local AMC theatre for movie gift cards. You guessed it … system down and no way to get anything. The final stop was a Wehrenberg theatre for movie gift cards. Surprise, everything worked, all systems go, buy as many as you wanted.

Since we are dealing with three large companies, one can only wonder how much business was lost due to system failure on this, we are told, the busiest shopping day of the season.

Oh, and when I went to the bank two days ago to get some new paper money for cash gifts, they were out of it.