WinCo Ghost Town Tuesday Walking With Working ATMs

With today's, Tuesday, August 18, temperature, a few degrees under 100, as measured by the Fahrenheit method it was to the Wichita Falls Ghost Town known as WinCo I ventured for my daily walking purposes, instead of my regular, heavily populated Walmart walking venue.

You can see, via the photo documentation, why we refer to WinCo as the Wichita Falls Ghost Town, nary a human to be seen as we head down yet one more empty aisle.

A new WinCo is under construction, currently, in my old Washington hometown of Burlington.

I hope the Burlington WinCo does a better job of being the new store in town than has been the case in Wichita Falls.

From its opening the Wichita Falls WinCo self-checkout ATMs have not worked right. The ATM would reject the slip in the card chip method, multiple times, then instruct to use the slide the card method, which would fail a couple times, before working. 

The failing WinCo ATMs were sort of amusing, as it was a sort of group annoyance, shared by the fellow customers and the employee in charge of watching the self-checkout, who quickly tired of all the ATM woes.

A couple months ago one of the long-suffering employees told me new ATMs were supposed to arrive in August. And those ATMs would have the tap method, in addition to the chip and slide methods.

Well, last week I was at WinCo. The new ATMs had arrived. And they were worse than the previous. When the chip method was rejected, I beckoned the WinCo employee, who then came to my ATM, she  tried to figure out how the tap method worked, then tried the chip method, and finally the slide method worked, after we managed to figure out where the slide slot was.

And now today, for the first time since WinCo opened, almost a year ago. the ATM worked flawlessly. Where to tap the card was clearly indicated. A loud beep clearly indicated the tapping was successful.

I shared my ATM joy with the self-checkout employee, one with whom I had previously lamented with regarding the sad state of the WinCo ATMs. She was even more pleased than I was. She said it has made her workday so much more pleasant.