They’re doing the same dollar volume in one hour that you’re doing in one or two hours. Would you care that much if your till was off by $5 or $10 at the end of the day? I agree it’s not right, but how much time is it going to take you to do a recount to either confirm your off, or worse, come up with a different number, which means you need to do a third count to see which one was right.
By dollar volume, it’s not so much, by transaction count, you’re right, it would be a large dollar amount.
If your individual transactions are much larger, why would you expect rounding to get rid of annoying amounts of change to be anywhere near as large of a percentage of your total? If you’re rounding off 10 cents on a $2.10 purchase, you’re looking at 4.7%. If you’re rounding off 10 cents on a $500.10 purchase, it’s only .02%. This is just a weird comparison.
$10 off Every day? Hell yeah, that’d be over 3 grand annually.
It wasn’t a comparison, I was just pointing out that my business doesn’t do the same type of sales/products as the convenience store. Sorry for the confusion.:o
I think there is a core disagreement here between myself and the rest of you. My observation is that this happens way more than some of you think, customers are not saying “keep the change” very often, which might balance out the till, and over the course of time this rounding practice does add up quit a bit. That’s my observation but most of you apparently disagree.
If it isn’t such a big deal how come one doesn’t see it often in corporate stores? Because running a business this loosely does eventually cost much more money that it costs to recheck till balances, that’s why.
I’ll tell you, if our tills aren’t coming out even, especially every day, even if by a minute’ amount, something would be done.
No, that’s actually not why. It’s because corporations don’t give individual store managers the level of autonomy that a small business owner has and because corporations don’t have the same knowledge of their employees that small business owners often have. There are all sorts of things I’ve seen mom-and pop stores do that corporate stores don’t do. Run a tab for regular customers, close the store down for a week for a vacation, or a day for a funeral - see that all the time with mom and pops, but never in corporate stores. It’s very common for a mom & pop to only employ family members, but that doesn’t happen in corporate stores - and there’s a real difference between trusting your wife or your son or your cousin who might as well be your brother not to steal a couple of bucks a day out of the register and trusting 2000 faceless people who you’ve never met not to do the same in your 500 stores. Not to mention that corporate stores are often responsible to stockholders while mom & pops are not.
I disagree.
You asserted that cashiers short the drawer by about a nickel nearly 500 times per day, but also suggest that customers don’t say ‘keep the change’ very often.
Multiple people in this thread, myself included, that run registers for hours at a time, are telling you that both of those statements are incorrect, to some degree or another.
We’ve mentioned all kinds of reason why it happens, to which you’ve shot down all of them.
I’m not really sure what you want.
OP, it seems that you’re not paying attention. Maybe other answers were too long or complicated? OK.
**
OP, you’re wrong. It doesn’t make any difference.**
Except you are not running registers in the places I’ve observed this happen.
Perhaps the customers who say “keep the odd nickel” are the same ones who got a nickel discount a few days before. A cashier will see fewer of the former if he isn’t rounding down for the latter.
There is an obvious solution. The purchasing power of a Dollar is pretty small now - mayby these tiny, low value coins have outlived their usefulness. Certainly anything smaller than a quarter.
I believe you’ve seen it happen, just not to the tune of 24 dollars a day in the red.
That’s assuming a $10 shortage every day. If half are overages then it all evens out.
I also think a high-volume, low-margin business is different than your operation. You could take ½ hour with a customer, talking about the finer points of different models whereas most of the employee’s interaction in a convenience store is at the register, with an occasional, you need more ___, or there’s a spill over there. Speed is part of why it’s called a convenience store. If your line’s too long, I’m leaving. Not so much in a gun store.
If you are selling high value goods, taking an extra two minutes to double check your numbers makes sense. You are only doing a few transactions a day, and customer service is much more important than speed.
The Kwik-E Mart is a different experience. You’ve got a line of people who just want to grab their Marlboro Lights and Diet Coke and go. Taking an extra two minutes per customer is a huge slowdown. With the convenience store you have to have a high volume of sales or your business won’t work.
I worked in a place where the registers easily did $3K-5K per shift across 2 shifts. We didnt even bother talking people until it was $20-30 off.
Even that was not a full “warning” more of just a “note in your file” Anyone who worked registers had a “register variance log” in their HR file. If it was over $5 we made a note to HR who added it to the log. The only time I remember hearing of a cashier being fired was for about $200 in discrepancies in a month. Usually they got fired for things that would not show a variance in their till like ringing in coupons not presented by the customer and pocketing the difference.
,
Thank you.
And that’s where the disagreement is. I think these independent places have totally screwed up tills and I’m perplexed how they do business like that on a regular basis, which is what I’m thinking happens.
I’m also perplexed by how many people here think an unbalanced till isn’t that big of deal, especially on a regular basis. Even an overage isn’t right if it happens consistently. It means someone or something screwed up. I’m surprised by the nonchalant attitude over it happening regularly.
We’ll have to agree to disagree, but if you read back through my posts, just keep in mind that they’re coming from someone that runs, counts the money and does the vast majority of the accounting for one of ‘these independent places’.
Funny thing, I thought of this thread today. Someones total was $1.48, he gave me a dollar, then pulled out some change and handed me two quarters. He not only said ‘keep the pennies’, but fished 3 or 4 more pennies out of his handful of change and tossed them in the little change dish.
We came out almost 5% up on that one sale alone.
OK, go talk to my employer about that, then.
My employer runs a high-volume, low profit margin business. Someone much higher up than me has decided that it is not cost-effective to count and re-count the till until it balances to the penny and determined the permitted parameters for being “off”.
I also have no illusions about this being tracked - it most certainly is. People have been fired for stealing, sometimes based on patterns when they are at the till. Absolutely the employer prefers that each drawer balances exactly, but the difference is that my employer is not getting obsessive over pennies. Or even quarters. They’ve been in business 85 years now and did $16 billion in revenue last year. I’m guessing they’re doing something right there. Oh, and they’ve given out 3 raises in the past two years to everyone at the company AND we just had the largest annual bonus given out ever in the companies history this month. I dunno, maybe they’re right that it’s not cost effective to spend the time and effort to balance each and every till to the penny every day, maybe the cost of the labor to hunt down $1.39 is more than the missing dollar amount, maybe they’re right to worry more about credit card fraud and shoplifting because maybe that’s costing the company more money than being off a bit on the cash drawer now and again. That’s not “nonchalant”, that’s running a cost vs. benefit equation and coming up with a different answer than you did.
Then again, what works for a company with 200+ stores and nearly 80,000 employees across six states isn’t necessarially what works for a small mom-and-pop shop, or a car dealership, or some other type of business. When I worked in shoe repair in small shops yes, the owners wanted that register to balance out every single day. Then again, a dollar was larger portion of their total money than it is for my employer.
Well, I got my answer.
My son-in-law is a district manager for a distribution company. Name brand food items. Mostly large grocery stores like Woodmans and Pick 'n Saves but I guess there are a few small gas stations and convenience stores along some of his drivers routes. I didn’t know that and just found out today when I brought up this subject. He works in an office so it never dawned on me he might know about this. We talked about it as my daughter drove us to pick up our motorcycles out of winter storage.
The answer is: *some the small independent convenience stores are completely full of shit. A lot of them are run by immigrants who have undocumented workers (or immigrant relatives whose visa has expired) to work for them. There are a lot of Iranians and Sikhs operating these places.
Every 6 months to a year they are giving the delivery drivers another tax ID number because they keep changing the name of the owner on paper because they keep little to no records for any tax purposes. Whatever they claim for income and sales tax collection is a fairy tale.
They don’t care what the register till balance is because they don’t care about accurate records for official purposes. They just make something up. The mark up on things at these places is usually so insane that they are making a nifty nickel no matter what. And when they get audited the owner on paper is usually nowhere to be found.*
All his words, not mine. But it’s about what I’d guessed. I just wonder why you don’t hear about these places getting audited, raided, or shut down very often.
That’s not the answer for the very white bread places I’ve worked at, but I’m glad your son-in-law confirmed your hunch. If you just wanted to hear the answer you wanted to hear, you should have told us.
I never said they were “white bread” places.
and he didn’t say all of them were like this, just some. The ones I’ve seen must be, though.