Oh, God, you are so far from the first person to screw up on cash - you probably weren’t even the first THAT DAY. They are just trying to scare you. I can’t guarantee that you won’t be fired, of course, but don’t believe the attitude your CSM is giving you. This is your first job, I assume you’re still fairly young, and they’re taking advantage of that.
I feel so much better now. I talked to one of my friends that has worked there much longer and she said about a week ago she came up short about $72 which was a lot more than me and all they did was talk to her to see where the problem was. So she told me I more than likely won’t get fired and they will just talk to me to see what happened. She said I won’t even get written up for it. Or shouldn’t because she was missing that much and they didn’t do anything to her other than to talk. She also told me that a couple of weeks ago the CSM people were lacking about $200 at the podium so they have no room to talk. She told me that the CSM I talked to exaggerates things all the time so not to worry.
I am seventeen. I hope they aren’t taking advantage of it. That would not be nice at all.
I know a lot of people who work at various Walmarts around the area here, and what everyone is telling you is accurate. A simple screwup at the cash register is not going to get you fired. Perhaps reassigned to a different job area if the amount was high enough (like several hundred dollars). But they won’t fire you unless there’s a good amount of evidence that you and the customer were acting in concert to commit theft. And I mean evidence, not just someone’s vague suspicion.
And, yes, some supervisors tend to over-react in recriminations, believing that you have to grovel to demonstrate your understanding of your mistake. Such supervisors seldom advance much further as it’s a symptom of their own lack of faith in employees under them to do their job. Which means, essentially, they’re not doing their own job properly.
Thank you. I know here, they aren’t that great. Some are though but those are the awesome ones to me. So everything will be ok yea?
Different places have different polices. When I was an asst controller for a hotel, I got rid of all cash handling policies because having them written down leads to fraud. For example the previous controller said, if you’re over/under 5.00 you got written up. You’d be surprised at the number of employees that were over/short 4.90.
Obviously they were over or under more and just throwing in a dime or taking it out so they wouldn’t get written up.
I worked a temp job at a dept store and came up 436.00 OVER in my drawer. How that happened I do know and they said, they checked the records and I must’ve been making wrong change. That’s a LOT of wrong change to rip people off and never have anyone complain. Since I was always dead on before and I only had a week left on the assignment they let me stay.
Losses in cashiering happen and stores know this and they have budgets and rules for it. A lot of places have the three strikes and you’re out policy. Of course this can lead to problems and abuse to.
If your employers see this attitude, they will hopefully realise you’re an employee who cares about doing a good job, and who they should keep. I hope it works out for you.
Welcome to working for a living.
So I’ll let you guys know what happened. I talked to the CSM who pulls the registers. As soon as I got there she wanted me on seven but I told her I needed to talk to her and I told her about the register being short and she said, “Yea, the coinstar thing. Don’t worry about it. If they got your note they may just give you a pink slip basically just telling you that you need coaching on that subject. You’re fine.” So yea. That’s how it went and then later that night these people tried to use like five different EBT (food) cards and it wound’t work anymore and the customer said, “I think your cashier did it wrong.” The same CSM said, “No. My cashier did everything she was trained to do.” It was awesome.
FACO, that’s great! So I was right! That means we split half of the money you too–KIDDING.
I think it’s sweet that you wanted to tell the CSM, and she already knew about it and was cool. She had you right back on the registers! Congratulations!
Was this a different CSM than the one who made a big deal about the mistake in the first place? In any case, congrats - sounds like everything is okay.
When I worked at Walmart I never saw anyone fired for coming up short on the till. I only remember people being fired for being chronically late or absent, or for stealing merchandise. A guy who worked in electronics stole a CD changer off the shelf (fairly expensive at the time) and attempted to sell it to the manager of the automotive department. He even admitted it was hot. He was not the sharpest tool in the shed, and was out on the street in short order.
FACO, glad everything worked out - everyone screws up from time to time - we’re all human.
I’m a manager, and I once sent a mass email to thousands of thousands of people in Denmark - in the wrong language. The reason I did it was that one of the people who worked for me always mixed “Dutch” and “Danish” up, and I was thinking about his constant mistake while selecting the people to receive the email - then I did it myself. :smack:
I allowed myself two minutes of cold sweats, then worked out who needed to know, who I had to apologize to, how I would make sure the mistake never occurred again (in my case, get the list triple-checked by people who weren’t in my department to ensure independence of analysis).
So, in my experience if you screw up, even BIG time, the best thing to do is to go straight to the person in charge and 'fess up. Importantly they will appreciate it if you have already worked out what you’re going to do to rectify the mistake (if you can; not possible in your case), and what you’re going to do to make sure it never happens again. As a boss, I understand people are going to make mistakes, because I do it myself, and it won’t make me go crazy if it only happens occasionally; but the “how can we make sure this doesn’t happen again?” part is what I expect from people who work for me.
Yea, I wasn’t sure if she knew yet or not though I am sure she already did. Thank you! I am glad I was back on there and it was fun last night too which I think it is most of the time anyway but I felt good.
Nope. Different CSM. She is really relaxed about things and stays at a register if you have a question till you have that question completed. She basically helps you through it step by step. Well in that case, I’m good then. I always show up and on time and everything. HAHA HE DOESN’T SOUND VERY SMART AT ALL! It’s kind of funny though.
Thank you. I’m glad too. Oh wow. Was that a big mess? I am pretty sure I got this mistake down now. I understand it completely and know what to do. Did the Denmark people understand the email at all?
Yeah, it was a pretty big disaster. Danish and Dutch are completely different languages, so no they didn’t understand a word. I had to write an email apologizing for the mistake, then get it translated into Danish. (Every cloud has a silver lining though - in the end it made more people respond to what we were saying because it was such a weird thing to happen.)
I was telling a Co-Manager (oops, now they’re called Shift Managers) about your story, and she told me that it happens, and all they do is help you learn how to avoid such mistakes in the future. In fact, she was telling me about one customer who’d gotten his paper slip back by mistake, and came back later to try cashing it again. The computers wouldn’t accept it. So your error was more of an accounting mistake than any actual cash loss.
The story is that some account manager under Andrew Carnegie had just lost a million dollar account. Humbly, he went to Carnegie and asked, “I suppose you’ll want my resignation?” To which Carnegie is said to have responded, “Are you kidding? This company has just spent a million dollars in training on you. We expect to see a return on that investment!”