Purchased a couple of items at Walmart, came to @10.16. Handed the girl at the cash register a twenty, a dime, a nickle and a penny. Pushed the change back to me with a confused look and said, "The twenty will cover it".
Making change
- Thread starter Lonnie
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We aren't educating many rocket scientists these days.
Worked at a retail liquor store chain for 16 years. I'm old school and the only one who never punched in 'amount tendered' on the register. If someone handed me a twenty for a $16.75 sale, I always added back up, giving them a quarter and saying that makes 17, then handing them 3 ones and saying, and 3 makes 20. I was the fastest register guy there, because if you hit cash tendered, you're going through 2 extra steps to make change. My money always came out right at the end of the shift (probably cause I wasn't a thief and if you hit cash tendered for $20 and the customer had only given you $10, you were $10 short. Funniest thing was that there was another manager there besides me (an old country gal)--when you pulled the pop-machine money, you had to extract the 5% sales tax before you rang up the money to account for the sales tax. She always multiplied the total by .95238(cause that was how the owner taught her how to do it), and was always a few pennies off. I told her all you need to do is divide the total by 1.05, and it will be exact every time--finally figured out she had never learned how to to division in school!
People don't know how to make change. I want it counted back to me, not handed to me in a pile.
Unfortunately, counting change back to you went away when the old mechanical cash registers were replaced with the new electronic ones. Some stores have the coin change dipensers built in to the cash registers and the checker will hand back the dollar bills to you.
The twenty will cover it.
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In my mind that's the only proper way to hand out return cash.
One of these days I will turn into one of those plastic-wielding tap-and-go customers, because I'm getting tired of having to make a crash dive for the coin dispenser while getting a 3 foot long receipt with a wad of bill slapped in my hand. I especially love those clown cashiers who airlift coins precariously balanced on a banknote in an attempt of an inpromptu HALO operation.
PS: Extracting a receipt with high velocity can cause papercuts on the cashier's fingers.
In Japan, your change is deposited on nice little tray for you by the cashier.
They don't want to actually risk touching your hand....
They don't want to actually risk touching your hand....
Why do we fuss over change, when the items we buy aren't measured to any better than 1% accuracy? Exactly how many corn flakes are there in a box?
I purchased 50 one pound chocolate bars on sale for a fountain. At the cash register the clerk had a problem and called the manager over. They were trying to scan one and then enter the count to come up with a total. They came up with $18.81 several times and looked completely confused. The manager looks up at me and said does that look good to you? Notice he did not ask if I though it was correct, he asked if it look good. He said that he was not going to scan 50 items just to get the total. I said it look excellent and he told the clerk to ring it up. I know this does not sound good for me, but I took the deal, paid and left. What I did in my head was to multiply 50 x 1.00 for fifty bucks, and then subtract 50 pennies for $49.50. That's why I though 18.81 look excellent, not correct. While this was happening my wife had to walk away. She was finding it difficult to keep a straight face. The manager bagged the bars and handed them to me and I left. Basic math was completely beyond this manager. So as you can see the chocolate bars really were on sale, a manager's special.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, someone is carefully examining a graph on their computer screen, trying to figure out why the company's profits have been droppin.
A one pound chocolate bar is 99 cents? I'm flying out!
Alas, behold the generation that will be governing this great nation in 20 years. I am not close enough to retirement to escape it...darn.
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The counting happens probably on the other side of the Pacific. I'm sure we are outsourcing bookkeeping, since it requires basic math skills.
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