Scan it?

We had a customer come into the store today to return a heated pet bed that wasn't the right size for their animal.
Only they didn't have the receipt.
But the customer knew that we could look it up.
Which, since I was on register.
I went ahead and tried to do that.

Only it wasn't showing up. 

I looked at like the last six receipts the customer had listed in our system from our store and our sister store.
And none of them showed the product that the customer was wanting to return.

But the customer insisted that they had bought the product from us and not from our competitor.

So I ended up calling a manager up to the front.
As the customer was like "This purchase here, I didn't buy this thing and it's the same price as the product I'm trying to return, maybe this was scanned by mistake." 

In any case.
We couldn't find the receipt. 

And at one point the customer was like "Can't you just scan the barcode of the product and that will tell you when I last bought it?" 

Uhm....
No. 
Like great idea. But our computers aren't that sophisticated. We can look up receipts that's it. We can't look up your purchases via scanning the product.
Like that seems....infeasible especially if the computers have to keep records of EVERY CUSTOMER purchase ever.
Because like the company has like thousands of locations. 
To be able to keep track of each product bought by each customer and being able to point out the customer that bought the product....seems rather....well invasive of privacy for one, but also totally complicated. Can you imagine the amount of memory storage that would take?

*shakes head*
So no...I think we're just gonna stick with looking up receipts. 

In any case.
Since the customer was buying other things as well, we just basically exchanged it out and the difference in price was paid. (if there was one because I stepped away to help a different customer so didn't see the end result of the transaction) 

But yay for complicated customers. 

-Sarnic Dirchi