I’ve never been at a till that simply had a yawning abyss all around it. I would like a diagram of one of these places that doesn’t have any space for you to move to the side to deal with your change.
I’ll third it.
When I worked at McDonalds in the early 90s they told us to do bills first and then change so the bills don’t fly away.
It’s in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Grocery Line of Despair.
“Nickles. Why’d it have to be nickles?”
No, it doesn’t have a yawning abyss all around it . It has stuff around it. An example of one- the counter is about three and a half feet to four feet wide. On one side of the counter is a wall and on the other side are a soda cooler and ice cream display placed perpendicularly to the counter. On that maybe four foot wide counter are two cash registers , a tip jar , and a napkin/straw dispenser. There’s barely room for the cashier to put my purchases down- there’s no space for me to move my purchase over and deal with the change. There’s not even space for me to move myself over and not hold up the line.There are other places that have slightly more floor space but still little counter space, as all but two feet or so of the counter is taken up by displays.
I’m sure you’d get 5% complaining no matter which way you did it. I do make it a point not to tell people how to do stuff they do all day long, every day. I’m sure they’ve had plenty of advice already.
I worked indoors, in a place largely free of intense gusting winds. I should add, though, that our notes are polymer, not paper.
I’ll admit that I’m clumsy, but I am reporting my experience. 
Also, disposing of the change would be easy with two hands free, but that is often not an option at the convenience stores I shop at – the checkout counters are so crowded (with chewing gum or condom displays!) that if I’m buying more than a single bag’s worth, the checker will have already handed me a bag to hold, to clear space.
Anyone at my employer handing out flat pieces of paper and then dropping coins on top of them to bounce and roll away will be reprimanded. The solution to a customer not grasping the bills is to continue to hold the bills until the customer realizes that they need to take action and close their hand around the bills. On the other hand, dropping coins onto the stack of flat bills gets even more dicey when the customer closes their hand on the bills, increasing the chance that the coins will not even find a flat surface on which to settle and will bounce sideways onto the countertop and the floor.
Your opinion is in error.
Dropping wads of cash onto a customer’s hand came into practice at exactly the time that cash registers began displaying the change after subtracting the totalled bill from the amount tendered. It can pretty well be dated to the period between 1975 and 1985, (depending on how quickly any given merchant upgraded from mechanical registers to electronic ones). It actually was an issue in training in that cashiers trained in the early 1970s or earlier “naturally” counted back change from coins up to larger bills so that they would have a clue regarding how much to hand the customer while cashiers trained later would frequently complain about having to count back change when “the machine tells me how much to hand back.”
They may do this in banks, where tracking the actual coinage/currency is important, but I have never seen a retail register that cared. (Even stores where they have rules against “making change,” (to prevent inexperienced cashiers from being taken by quick change artists), the cashiers need to “buy change” throughout the day and I have never seen anyone actually ring up the “sale” of rolls of coins and packs of singles for the twenties and fifties that have been received.)
I think I noticed a nearly simultaneous change at most vendors:
They drop bills in my hand, oriented the same way my hand is oriented,
Then the receipt,
Then the coins,
All too rapidly for me to put any of it away,
Then turn to the next customer which suggests to me I’m already holding things up with my one hand full of packages and my other hand loaded with money I can’t grab without spilling.
It so accurately follows a prescription for awkwardness that I can’t help suspecting it is some kind of comedy skit.
I have a question for all of the people in the “Count Up” camp. I do not like to have gobs of coins in my pocket. When I buy something, I like to add coins so that I get a more manageable amount of change. An example is my lunches at McD’s. What I get for lunch adds up to $4.76. I naturally pay $5.01, so that I get a quarter back instead of two dimes and four pennies. I know this is an easy example, but if the bill is $5.66, and someone hands you $10.16, how does your “Count Up” method account for this?
This “counting up” thing seems unnecessarily complicated and backwards compared to simple subtraction, assuming one has to calculate the change. It makes sense but has added steps and just seems odd to someone not specifically trained to approach it that way.
Ring up the items.
State the total. (6.75)
State the amount tendered. “Out of twenty”
Place the bill(s) on the money drawer.
Hand over the quarter, “seven”.
Count the bills aloud into the customer’s hand, “three is ten, ten is twenty”.
Hand the receipt and say “Thank You”.
Place the bill(s) in the drawer.
I would say 5.66 out of 10.16, hand them .50 and say six, hand them four singles and say ten. You giving the .16 shows you know the arithmetic.
Way back in the good old days when cashiers had to calculate the change themselves I overheard a girl, most probably a high school student earning some extra money while on summer holiday, excuse herself, saying that they only used calculators at school and never had to do it in their heads.
Total rings up to $9.35. Customer hands me a $20 note. I open my till and
a) Count up. 5c, 10c, 50c with my left hand, $10 bill and receipt with my right. Place receipt, note in outstretched hand and say “That’s 10 dollars…” and then add coins on top and say “… and 65 cents change, and your receipt. Thank you”.
Or
b) Look at the change due on the screen and count down. Receipt and $10 bill with my right hand, 50c, 10c, 5c with my left. Place receipt, note in outstretched hand and say “That’s 10 dollars…” and then add coins on top and say “… and 65 cents change, and your receipt. Thank you”.
I don’t see how counting up or down affects how I give change. Then again, I used to amuse myself by totaling the purchases in my head as I scanned because it’s a long, boring day if you don’t find small games to amuse yourself with, so I don’t consider myself the kind of cashier who lives and dies by the machine’s reckoning.
Again, I’m going from my own experience. I was never taught how to give change, but this is the method that I found most effective so I stuck with it. Someone occasionally gives you a dirty look no matter how you do it because there are always people married to “only right way” (see: toilet paper, over or under).
I do not care how one counts out the change. As long as it it accurate, everyone should be happy.
I do object to the odd notion that dropping coins onto flat pieces of paper, (even to “weight them down”), would ever be consistently successful. Unless the bill is fifteen years old and has the flexibility of tissue paper, it is going to be stiff enough for coins to roll off of it. As soon as the fingers begin to curl around the paper to grasp it, the paper is going to change angles and let the coins slide down and off the bills.
And I prefer coins last. Easier to slide them off the bills into my other hand and put them in my pocket, then the bills into my wallet. Can’t please everyone either way they go.
It’s that good old German efficiency. As a professional cook, I’ve gotten in the habit of never handing things directly to another person. Instead, I set it down and let them pick it up themselves. Why? Because the moment of handing something to another person is the mostly likely point at which the item will be dropped, usually because the giver lets go before the receiver has established a grip. When the object in question is hot or sharp, you don’t want to be dropping it. So I can see the logic in placing the money on the counter and letting the other person pick it up. It’s less likely to get dropped.
I got my first cash register job in 1983, and we had the modern digital registers that calculated the change. But I was still trained to “count up” the change, and continued to do it that way at all my future cash register jobs. To clarify, I would take the change out of the till based on what the display told me, but then I would “count up” as I handed it to the customer. It was a nice double-check to confirm that I’d counted the correct change out of the till. I credit the method for the fact that 99% of the time my end-of-shift register total was correct down the penny. I never had a register come up more than a dollar off.