The B.P. on West Ave. is sparking big controversy in Jackson this week.
This Tuesday, Spring Arbor resident, John Henry, stopped by the gas station for a fill up on his way home from work. He went inside to grab a Snickers bar, Calypso Lemonade and a dozen bags of Deli Mustard Style Gardetto's to parcel out through the week.
When he got to the register to pay, Henry was in for a rude awakening. Henry has a new credit card, one with a chip built in to protect against identity theft. He attempted to insert the card into the chip reader to pay.
“Sorry,” the cashier said, “Our chip reader doesn’t work yet, and actually the whole thing is just a block of wood.”
“I’ll admit, I’m stubborn,” Henry recalled. “I tried anyway. I rammed my card into that block of pine. It hurt my hand a little, and I got a massive splinter,” he said, showing off his pus-y, infected nub of a hand, “but, I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction.”
He added, “I mean, it’s not like the card readers work in Spring Arbor. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they were cheap about it. Pine? Pine is the box wine of woods.”
Jackson resident Leann Schaffer disagreed.
“This is an improvement,” she said. “Sure, it isn’t mahogany, oak, or even cherry. But, you know how many times I’ve inserted my credit card into the chip reader only to have the cashier tell me the reader doesn’t work? It’s so embarrassing I want to kill myself.”
“At least with the block of wood you know where you stand,” she added.
Other businesses seem to be taking note. Starbucks replaced their chip reader with a boiling cauldron, and Jackson’s Panera Bread has opted to put a wooden baseball bat with nails sticking out of it in the scanner’s place.
Panera Bread manager, Tom White, seemed positive about the new direction.
“We had some resistance at first. To be honest, the feedback wasn’t all positive. But, real progress takes time. I mean, hey, they hated Jesus, too, right?” he said with a laugh.
B.P. franchise owner, Harvey Miller, said he is proud to be blazing a new trail for his hometown.
“People ask me, ‘Why the block of wood? Why not a bale of hay, or a Bonzai tree?’ I understand the concern. I always liken it to what Apple has done with the iPhone 7. People lost their minds when they removed the aux cord slot. But then they realized, ‘Hey, the Galaxy explodes,’” Miller said. “People call us anti-consumer. We’re not anti-consumer. We’re just pro not allowing our customers to purchase the goods they want. It’s a subtle difference.”
Miller said that next he plans to replace the cash register entirely.
“We’re working on that as well. It feels so behind the times that customers can still pay for stuff here. We’re workshopping a few ideas for what to replace it with. Right now, the leading contenders are a taxidermy cat, a stack of McRib boxes, and a KFC bucket with eye holes cut out of it.”
“We like how whimsical that last one is,” he said with a smile.
For now, customers can visit the location that started it all, here in downtown Jackson. The woodblock is still there, covered in blood, impassive, proud, and, most importantly, totally unable to read a credit card at all.
