I have no idea. I wait tables, and time and again I see my fellow servers rush to the computer to have it tell them how much change to give for a $20 bill on a check of, say, $15.63. That sort of thing is second nature for me by now, and some of these people have been at it longer than I have.
Then again, lack of ability to subtract is only the second most amusing arithmetic deficiency I see each day. The winner comes from folks who pay with credit cards, and can’t figure out how to add the tip to the subtotal to fill in the “Total” blank. If I had to estimate, I’d say 35% accomplish this with no problem: the 25% who leave an even dollar amount, and the 10% who actually know how to add. Of the first group, many of them actually end up having to do longhand addition, “carrying” and all. I get a chuckle every time I see this:
1
Total: 25.36
Tip: 5.00
Total Amt: 30.36
I don’t fault them for it, though, because it does prevent the most common mistake among the mathematically-challenged: forgetting that two amounts less than a dollar whose sum exceeds a dollar increases the number of whole dollars by one. So, I get this.
Total: 31.70
Tip: 5.50
Total Amt: 36.20
As the law goes, I must finalize the credit sale for the total amount signed for; in this case, the person’s inability to add screws me out of a dollar. Not a big deal in most cases, but I’ve twice seen people get a $10.00 bite in the ass off a large party’s check thanks to this. Oddly, the reverse (adding an extra dollar where none is called for) has never happened in my experience, nor that of anyone I’ve worked with. Imagine that.
Then, of course, you get the people who are just plain bizarre. I got this the other day:
Total: 53.13
Tip: 8.00
Total Amt: 60.00
Um…no. Just…no. But indeed, nowhere near as bad as this other real-life example:
Total: 13.80
Tip: 3.00
Total Amt: 8.80
The people had left before I picked up the slip, so we were unsure what exactly to do with it. The GM told me to go ahead and finalize the check for $16.80, since the written total didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
I can only conclude that we need to take arithmetic out of the elementary schools and starting teaching it as an adult-level curriculum. After graduating from high school, everyone takes a few compulsory addition/subtraction courses, including “Why .8 plus .8 != .6” and “Decimal + Whole Number != Whole Number”. Oh, and for your sake, Colophon, we’ll throw “How To Add 99p to Something In Two Easy Steps”. It ought to be a higher-level course, though; the whole subtract-1p-add-1£ concept might be too much for the untrained mind.
