I run a small store, I also to the book keeping. The ledgers are fine. The reason is that you have two numbers at the end of the day. The actual amount of money you brought in and the number the register spits out. Yes, they don’t match, however (assuming were talking about small discrepancies, not stealing), the only important number is how much money you have.
Sure, the register may say $965.38 for the daily total, but if all I have is $963.27, that’s how much goes to the bank, gets reported for tax purposes, can be used to pay bills etc.
In that case, at my store, I’d put down $963.27 for the daily total and I make a little note that says -$2.11. Every single page of books that we have, since this business started nearly 40 years ago, has a little that over/under amount.
A few cents, even a few dollars isn’t a big deal. But I use that number to track patterns. Between the cash, the credit cards (esp w/ the CC machine not linked to the register), general mistakes or lack of knowledge on how things should happen, handing out a little more or taking a little less to round up/down, it’s part of business.
And, before anyone says it, the way my store is setup isn’t conducive to having each employee run their own register or have their own till.
As for the frequency, unless it’s policy in that store or someone has taken it upon themselves to do that, I don’t think it happens all that often. Sure, once in a while I’ll hear a cashier round up a penny or two, but not all that often. Also, it tends to balance out due to enough people saying “just keep the penny” or the cashier bringing it back to zero from our little take a penny/leave a penny jar.
its hardly worth stealing a dollar or two, so if the cash box is a couple dollars one way or the other I make note and kinda keep a running tally of who was on that day. Patterns occasionally emerge.
But you’re talking about $2 lousy dollars for an entire day. It seems to me that these stores I’m talking about are behind at least 12 times that every single day.
I own a gun store. Our purchases are routinely in the hundreds and even thousands of dollars, sometimes in cash for high amounts. If our register was short the same percentage that the convenience stores is we’d put an end to it. There shouldn’t be shortages at all, and especially on a daily basis, and especially intentional.
Nothing really to add except the discussion brought to mind a guy I knew in while we were teens in the 80s who was something of a klepto, and while working as a supermarket cashier used to flirt with the housewives and wink at them while he passed their steaks etc. into the bagging area without scanning them (don’t know if/when he was caught.)
The odd thing is I was running a register and reading the thread. Within the 10 minutes or so it took to wait on 7 customers and read the thread I was positive 26 cents on the till. What everyone is forgetting is the people who’s total is like 1.07 and toss you 1.25 and say keep the change. Next customer’s bill is 1.02…“Don’t worry about it!” If I don’t want to dig out .98 from the register.
OP, I’m curious what kind of answer you’re looking for? Seems like people have explained things pretty clearly (at least to this non business owner) but you still are dissatisfied. What would you like to hear? (And if what you want to hear is “it’s because they’re stupid” it’s fine to say that too ������)
I’m sure it does seem that way to you, but why? I mean, you don’t work in the store, and I would be surprised if you said you had ever spent even a whole hour in the store because people don’t normally spend an hour in convenience stores. There’s no reason to think that if you saw them short the register a nickel in five minutes that it means it happens every five minutes, twelve times an hour ,twenty four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year to the tune of over $5K a year. There are probably hours where they don’t even have 12 customers, much less 12 cash-paying customers with a total ending in .05 or .10. Because remember, it won’t happen with anyone who is paying with a card, and it won’t happen with people whose total ends in .25 or more.
And that’s before you account for the people who don’t want change from the $1.25 they gave you for the $1.07 total, or the people who get .57 in change and take the two quarters and leave the nickel and two pennies.
A gun store is a very different business- you probably don’t have crowds of people wanting to get their guns and get out of there within five minutes. Getting customers in and out quickly has more value in a convenience store than in a gun store. Because if it takes me 10 minutes to pay for my coffee, I may start going elsewhere.
Most of the stores and restaurants I used to patronize had no registers and rounding down was routine. Chain stores, with registers, never round down. An exception occurs at some 7-Elevens when amount is a non-integral amount, e.g. ฿81.50. Then they usually round against the customer. (One time though a 7-Eleven cashier pushed a special button resulting in a receipt notation like “Customer given discount in lieu of 50-satang coin.” Thailand has over 10,000 7-Eleven stores, making it 2nd only to Japan.)
In that case, wouldn’t he look with dismay when cashier returns one of the dollar bills? He’d say “I’d prefer the 95 cents change, please.”
I’m guessing that A)you’re making an assumption about how the convenience store’s register balances by the end of the night and B)your store doesn’t do hundreds and hundreds of cash transactions each day.
My store does about 300-400 transactions per day, I know they round up pr down here and there, but as I said, by the end of the day I’m only up or down a few dollars. An amount no one is batting an eye at.
You also keep on harping on the cashier shorting the drawer, but never take into consideration that some transactions result in extra money in there as well.
I also note that in your OP you said the cashier shorted the drawer by a nickel “several times a day”. But later put it at closer to 20 times per hour or nearly 500 times a day.
I think that’s part of the misconception as to what’s going on. It’s several times a day, not 300 or 400 or 500 times a day.
Yes, but my point was that the register doesn’t get shorted all that often- and if the customer says he’d prefer the 95 cents change, the cashier will give it to him and the register isn’t shorted on that transaction.
It could also be a burden for a small business to keep sufficient coinage available, so if they are giving $.95 change on multiple $x.05 purchases it can be a real pain to keep the register and store safe stocked with spare coins. Most people seem to only pay in round dollars, so it can be quite a hassle. If you’re concerned about fraud, I would suspect the greater risk is inventory defalcation, which is much easier to hide in many stores that sell fungible goods in volume.
I don’t know what the permitted variance on the till is where I work, they don’t tell us cashiers, but given that there have been days I’ve done over $5k in cash transactions alone (usually around the holidays) and on a typical day a couple thousand being off by a whole dollar would be something like 0.02%. If for some reason there is an unacceptably large difference between what should be in the till and what actually is then, depending on the amount, either all cashiers who touched the drawer are put on “audit” for a day (their transactions are monitored more closely) or a criminal investigation ensues and the video is checked - every register has a camera above it and every transaction is filmed.
My company has decided that keeping a line five deep in waiting customers moving is more important that waiting for, say, a frail elderly person trying to dig the last $0.02 out of her teeny tiny change purse with arthritic fingers. Foregoing the two pennies keeps the customers - not just the little old lady but the five people behind her - happier. They’d rather have the sale of $100 or $200 than tell the person who came up short on groceries nope, you can’t have any of it because you’re short a nickel. I guess they figured the good will compensates for the minuscule loss, even if the profit margin on food is only about 3%. We have sufficient volume to cover it.
I don’t know how they deal with it in the back office but they have some sort of system to cover it. The notion that each and every till has to balance exactly is incompatible with human beings moving at top speed for 8 hours at a stretch. Mistakes will happen. Coins will be dropped. Dollar bills might stick to each other. Sure, if we moved at half the speed there would be less of that, but really none of that is terribly common, either, and no one moves at less than full throttle these days. When things were slower and more people carried change exact tills were more of a thing but not anymore outside of small shops. Big box stores don’t operate like that, valuing speed and volume over exactitude.
What decade are you living in? Only the managers can ring up a “No Sale” with their special keys, and we have two cameras on us at all times. I’m going to risk my job to take money out of the till? I don’t think so.
Actually, at my store the cashiers can hit the “no sale” button. But yes, we, too, are on camera at all times. Obviously, different stores are different.
Cashiers at my store have more ability to resolve issues and can do things that other stores reserve to managers. That’s a decision of the employer. Although, as I tell my customer, my super powers are limited and I’ve been sworn to use them only for good. I still have to send people to customer service or call a manager for a lot of things.
Even not at top speed, mistakes happen. I worked for a few years at a coffeehouse that did a range of $900 - $1200 of sales per day, $1500 on really busy days during festivals or something like that. There’d be rushes, but nothing too crazy. And yet it was a miracle if we ever got the tills to balance to the penny. Some days you’re up a buck; other days you’re down a buck. Sometimes you’re really close, but a penny fell. Etc. I do believe there have been times where it balanced exactly, but across six to eight employees throughout the day, it was unlikely. Plus, yes, there were times we’d be “don’t worry about the two cents” or the customer was “don’t worry about the change.” If it was just a few pennies, nickels, etc. we just kept it in the drawer. If it was more, sure, we’d put it in the tip jar. I mean, when I go shopping and paying cash, I often tell the cashier to just not worry about the change if it’s small change.
I don’t need pennies and nickels in my wallet. I’m sure I’m far from the only one who does this. So there is also the matter of it somewhat balancing out during the course of a day.
It seems like the OP is very detailed orientated, but as pointed out it is not required, nor is it a tax hit, and does foster customer good will, and also that rounding does swing both ways, making life better for most people, cashier and customers, and as stated should have no effect on anything down the line.
Never underestimate the stupidity and/or greed of people that steal. You get used to the cameras and don’t think about them, you know the register was shorted a buck or two and no one said anything…it’s not difficult to get a five dollar bill from the register to your pocket…no one says anything so you do it more often.
Even though no one ever said anything to you, they noticed, they find a pattern, they know who to watch, they catch it happening and you’re fired. You had no idea any one had a clue and suddenly you get a call before your shift starts to let you know that you no longer work here.
Oh, with that, we let our employees do that as well. It’s the only way they can open the drawer between customers to get rid of big bills, get change from the backroom during a break in customers or anything else that requires them to get into the drawer.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter, if someone really wants to steal cash, they’ll just do it while the drawer is opened from a sale.