AKA, JCPenney has it all figured out and no one else does.

This past weekend, Heather and I decided to do our gift registries for our wedding. We chose to file at JCPenney, Sears and Bed Bath & Beyond. Our experiences are below:

• JCPenney, Easily the most “organized” of the wedding registry systems. As far as scanning goes, the kiosk appears to be custom made, with barcode scanners “locked” in the right hand side, and a printer/keyboard underneath the touch-screen monitor. The interface was really easy to control, and within minutes we had unlocked the barcode scanner (it’s a “gun” type scanner) and was shown a quick video on how to use the scanner (such as changing quantities, colors, etc.) Items were easy to scan, and the barcode scanner could show your entire list thus far, with options to edit or delete items if necessary, right on the scanner. Bringing it back to the kiosk and docking it downloaded our items, and we were done. JCPenney has a special deal where if you register for XX items (I believe it’s 15?) you get a free wedding planning book, which sounds cheesy, but is actually pretty spiffy. It’s a hard-cover binder that includes a compact three-hole punch, calculator, paper, business card holders, and folders for every aspect of your wedding, to make it easy to file away say, your catering contract. Nice!
• Sears, The worst, hands down. Their kiosk is an old CRT monitor, a laser printer, and a keyboard. The interface is basically Sears’ own web site (on a slow connection, at least at our location.) We tried repeatedly to log in, but kept getting invalid password errors. Turns out the keyboard’s caps lock was pressed in. Ugh. Made us print out a sheet to take to the nearest customer counter, to pick up our scanner. Went over to the counter where an elderly gentleman (God bless him!) honestly had no idea what to do for wedding registries. So he tried to page someone who would. We waited around for about five minutes, until someone else came over, who also didn’t know what they were doing, but she was able to at least get the scanner working. The scanner was a glorified Palm-pilot, with barcode scanner on top. The barcode scanner would often not work, and I’d have to press other buttons, and then the scan button, in order to get it to scan. After we were done, there’s no “docking” involved, I guess it’s all realtime. So we laid the scanner back on the counter and left.
• Bed Bath & Beyond, Could have been terrible, but was redeemed by excellent customer service. We met with someone at the front counter who asked for our names. My bride to be gave her name, and the woman asked if the wedding date was 7/14… we told her no, it’s 10/13. She thought for a moment and did something else, then issued us a scanner. This one was also flat (like Sears) but had a hand strap on the back, making it much more comfortable to use. The display was very basic, only listing the brief descripton and quantity. There was no way to delete a just-scanned item or previously-scanned item via the controls by itself. There was however a “oops” barcode you could scan on the sheet they provide in order to undo the last item you scanned. We spend about an hour and a half or more scanning items, then returned to the counter to see what we had chosen. Another employee helped us this time. Upon printing out the registry, it was completely blank. He had no explanation, and couldn’t figure out why. He promised to take our information and call us back on Monday. Monday came, and no phone call. So Heather called and got in touch with another employee at that location. They apologized profusely, and promised they would look into it and get back within the hour. They did call back this time, and explained that they cannot find our scans at all, and promised a gift card for our troubles. We decided to come back down Monday night and re-scan our items. Sure enough, we got a $50 gift card out of it, and our items scanned in correctly this time. Big points to BB&B’s customer service here. However, I can’t help but feel that this whole thing would have been avoided if the first employee had just double-checked our wedding information (we couldn’t see her monitor, and she never offered.)

So there you have it. If you’re getting married soon, might be some helpful advice in there. Just stay away from Sears. Unless you like pain?