I’m not very thing-oriented, but apparently some family members feel obliged to buy gifts for the upcoming nuptials and made a point of asking my mother whether Gwen and I were registered anywhere.
So we duly registered at Linens ‘n Things (note the lonely apostrophe) and Target. What a mess, particularly at LnT.
Setup
At LnT, you sit down at a computer in the middle of the store with one of the few employees who’s been trained up on the process. He takes your information and plugs it into a computer (a process that takes much too long, and involved a couple of false-starts on his part). You could also do the initial setup online, but I suspect most people will do this in the store, if only because of instinct. The clerk then gives you a barcode scanner keyed to your registry number and you start scanning away.
At Target, you go to an automated kiosk (or you could do it online), and enter pretty much the same information through a touchscreen; even allowing for the annoyance of typing on a touchscreen with ABCDE layout instead of QWERTY, this was much faster than the equivalent at LnT. The kiosk prints out a slip, which you take to customer service, where they key a scanner to your registry number, and then you start scanning away.
In both cases, they inevitably asked for data that will be valuable for reselling, such as e-mail and phone. We declined to give phone numbers, and I gave them a temporary e-mail address that I will delete when the whole process is complete.
Scanning
Though I was reluctant to admit it at first, there’s no question in my mind that walking through a store with a scanner is more efficient and effective than picking out items on the web for most items. Some items that involve more background research (say, a computer) are probably better purchased online, as are some that you can identify beforehand (for example, a particular CD or DVD that you know you want). But when you have a general idea that you want a new coffeemaker, it’s hard to beat picking them up and looking at them–even helpful amazon reviews can only augment this, not replace it.
At LnT, the scanner seems pretty industrial–I’m guessing it’s the same one the staff uses for taking inventory and the like–and it’s not especially friendly. It’s an awkward, blocky shape to hold and the scanning element faces the side. It did allow us to plug in a quantity after scanning, rather than repeatedly scanning the same item. I asked if it was possible to delete something that we scanned accidentally; apparently it isn’t–instead, one would have to go onto the Internet or use the computer in-store, which has a touchscreen kiosk mode that is truly awful–slow, with a significant alignment error between the actual spot touched and the cursor position.
At Target, our printout had a special “delete” barcode on it; to delete a previously scanned item, scan that and then scan the item. But there was no way to key in multiples of an item–we had to scan something twice to buy two of them. The scanner itself had a better design–quite a lot like a phaser from Star Trek–easier to hold and to point accurately, and fewer buttons to confuse the user (though even the buttons that were there were pretty much unnecessary).
Neither scanner confirmed the name of the item after we scanned it. It shouldn’t be difficult to store a lookup table of UPCs and product names in the scanner, and it would be helpful to be able to see a list of what we’ve scanned and make immediate changes.
Online
The real value in these registries is in that they make it easier for other people to shop for you online. LnT’s website is so bad, however, that I feel a bit guilty asking anyone to use it. When I first visited the site on Gwen’s machine (running Internet Explorer 5), each page-load took about two minutes, waiting for a javascript to construct the dynamic department-navigation bar. The only way to use the site without going batty was to disable javascript entirely. It is ironic that when I viewed the site in Safari and Camino that some of the top navigation links (including, crucially, “gift registry” and “help”) were made invisible by ad-blocking settings I’ve got on those browsers. They also have a few cosmetic problems, but nothing serious. I took a glance at the HTML code behind LnT’s website, and it’s awful: there is no BODY element on the pages; all the content is crammed into javascripts in the HEAD, and is filled with table-hacks and non-breaking spaces for position.
Trying to access the registry at the Target website was initially crazy-making. I tried to sign in as a customer with an existing account (having set one up at the kiosk), but apparently there’s a difference between a kiosk account and an online account: I had to create a new account and then link it to the kiosk account. I was concerned that I’d overwrite the existing kiosk account, though in fairness, the instructions make clear that this will not happen, and I just wasn’t paying careful attention. The HTML at the Target site isn’t as pathologically weird as LnT’s, it’s not exactly clean either.
How can they improve?
Let me sit down somewhere a little out of the way and type the information on a real keyboard. Don’t insult me with a touchscreen keyboard, especially in ABCDE order. Not everybody will be comfortable with a keyboard, so have a clerk help them. There’s enough money in a registry that the store can afford to allocate five minutes to setting it up.
Redesign the scanner. There should be a tenkey pad for quantities or manually keying in UPCs, plus buttons to confirm, delete, and change previous scans. There should be a display that can show at least ten lines of text, so that the customer can scroll through and see names and quantities of items. These functions should be clearly labelled The device should be easy to hold and to aim.
Once you get in, both LnT’s and Target’s websites are easy enough to use, the previous problems aside. They both helpfully break up registry items by department.
The whole concept of buying items off of someone else’s list could be taken farther. It may be a bit crass, but rather than letting friends check off a specific item they want to give as a gift, let them simply spend a certain amount of money towards the gifts on the list. There are some things that Gwen and I registered for that are too expensive for most friends to consider giving as gifts. Friends already go in together to buy one big gift, and this would make that easier. And some people registering for gifts are known to register for many cheap items that they don’t really want, but that their friends can afford; once the gifts come in, they exchange a bunch of cheaper gifts for the more expensive item they really wanted: the cheap gifts are intermediate units of account and nothing more. For that matter, I’d like a bank to have a gift registry, so I could register for some hundred-dollar bills.
