I bought lunch from a sandwich shop near the office, and saw a sign at the register saying “If we don’t give you a receipt, your order is free” or words to that effect. I’ve seen these signs before in similar places – mostly fast food and/or counter service restaurants.
Two thoughts:
It strikes me as a disproportionately severe penalty to a relatively minor offense. Say the clerk is busy or distracted, and forgets to hand me my receipt. That means I’m eating for free? It seems to me a simple apology would be more than adequate.
There are much worse offenses that can happen at a sandwich shop than merely forgetting to hand me a receipt, and there’s no promise of a free meal if they occur. Let’s say they give me the wrong order. That’s much more annoying. Sure, they’ll correct it – but I’m still expected to pay for it. It’s as if they’re saying that the worst thing that could happen to me while in their establishment is that I may have to wait an extra 5 seconds to get a receipt when it is not immediately presented to me.
I see this is already bordering on MPSIMS territory. To bring it back to GQ – does anyone know if there’s a reason for this? Did some restaurant lose a court case once because of failure to give a receipt, and now they’re all super-cautious about it?
My understanding from times I’ve seen similar signs places (Taco Bell seems to be prone to this, for whatever reason) is that it is intended to prevent staff from shortchanging customers or overcharging them and pocketing the difference.
It’s a way of preventing the clerk from ringing up the order for less than the real price and pocketing the difference.
Say you buy $10 worth of food. The clerk can ring this up as $8 and take your $10 and not give change, the pocket the difference.
By requiring them to hand the receipt, it means that the clerk runs the risk of you looking at it and discovering the discrepancy. (“I gave you $10, but this says it was only $8. What’s going on?”).
Making the offer to the customer also makes it more likely they’ll look at the amount of the receipt.
Makes perfect sense – and I hadn’t even considered this. I guess I was taking a customer-centric view. As a customer, if I buy $10 worth of food and hand the clerk $10, I don’t much care what they do with it. But clearly the restaurant management does.
In either Accounting or Management class, this was one of the ways listed to prevent theft by cashiers. Say, for example, the cashier looks at your basic order of Sandwich, Chips, and Soda, knows that it’s going to be $8.13 after tax, and tells the customer the total. The customer accepts this (either because he’s a regular or because he just doesn’t question it), and hands the cashier the money. Cashier gives change, as needed, but doesn’t put the $8.13 in the register, but into his pocket. If the cashier doesn’t ring up the sale, but makes sure that he only takes exactly the amount of purchase from the register after he makes the proper change, then the register will balance at the end of the day, although if an inventory is taken, then the books will show that the inventory is short by at least one pair of bread slices, one bag of chips, and one soda cup. Sandwich sales are tracked by bread slices or buns, and soda sales are tracked by cups. Similarly, if we have the same SCS sale, and the cashier knows that a sandwich and chips comes to $6.13, he can “forget” to ring up the soda and pocket the $2.00 that he didn’t ring up.
Keeping employees honest is also why there are box offices selling tickets and ushers taking tickets at theaters. It’s pretty easy for a box office cashier to take in money and let movie goers into a theater without putting the money into the drawer, if there’s no one taking tickets. As long as the cashier makes sure that he rings up the first few ticket sales, pockets the money for the next several sales, and then rings up sales again, then it’s pretty easy for him to just claim that it was a slow night. However, if the theater has an usher who won’t let people in without a ticket, then the box office cashier pretty much HAS to issue a ticket for every single sale, or he’s going to have a lot of people complaining that they got ripped off.
By using customers to make sure that they get their own receipts, the sandwich shop owners are using the customers as a check against the cashiers dipping into the till.
The system would be useful in keeping employees honest and avoiding arguments with customers, but there is also a marketing aspect to the policy of a posted sign. Unlike other systems where the business doesn’t want the public knowing about their procedures, this one gives the impression of better management, and some sort of consideration for the customers, who largely don’t want the receipt anyway.
This is the same reason some stores have people checking receipts at the exit: It catches dishonest cashiers as well as dishonest customers.
In the fast food biz, it is not infrequent that orders get screwed up. If the customer has a receipt, it makes it much easier to determine where/how the error occurred. So in addition to discouraging dishonest cashiers, the policy can aid quality control by encouraging customers to accept and keep track of their receipts.
An anecdote to back up the above posts: a few years ago, I went into a Taco Bell and was offered the “$5 special.” The cashier explained that for $5, I could get whatever I wanted. Obviously, there was no receipt, and the money would not be going into the till.
I kind of miss living in questionable neighborhoods.
Ever wonder why cash registers ring? (Or, at least, used to ring, back when they were mechanical, not electronic.) It’s for the same reason as the reciept requirement – to keep the clerks honest.
Back in the days before cash registers, losses from dishonest sales help were substantial. So someone invented a machine that would record a purchase and ring a bell whenever the cash drawer was unlocked. This freed up the store owner to busy himself anywhere in the store, confident that the cash was untouchable. If some clerk made a sale, the clerk would have to “ring it up” on the register in order to access the cash drawer. The owner would hear the bell, look over to the cashier, and watch the purchase until it was over and the drawer was closed up again. With the owner watching, cashiers had little choice but to keep their transactions honest.
Right. This last part “makes sure that he only takes exactly the amount of purchase from the register” is why having a register/cashier over a lot is also a bad sign. :eek:It means they tried to steal, but weren’t able to slip the cash into their pocket or forgot to.
Yep. If the cashier makes an honest mistake, and gives too little change, most customers will call him on it, so it’s not likely that having too much cash in the drawer at the end of the day is an honest mistake. If the cashier gives too much change, there are quite a few people who won’t say a word, but will be happy to get the bonus money.
I’ve had cashiers try to tell me that I gave them a ten when in fact I gave them a twenty. This is a pretty common scam that some cashiers will try to use, and if it works, then they can get a couple of hours’ worth of wage (back when I worked) right then and there, if it doesn’t work, then they can just say “Oh, sorry” and make the adjustment. This is one of the minor reasons why I use a magic marker to black out “In God We Trust” on just about all of my paper money. I holler for a manager, and tell the manager about the problem, and show the rest of the bills in my wallet. I’ve had one cashier get fired on the spot because he had my twenty in the drawer, and he had told the manager that I’d only given him a tenner. Probably he’d had other customers complain about being shortchanged, but I could PROVE that I marked my money in a particular fashion.
Back to my example, if a cashier made sure to take the eight bucks, but didn’t take the thirteen cents, then he’d have an over drawer just about every shift, which is a warning sign. He’s going to do this with more than one order, so those few cents are going to add up over the course of his shift. Every place with a cash drawer expects that it will run over and under on occasion, with more unders than overs over the long run, because people will complain more readily about being shortchanged. Most places will also have a limit for the over/under discrepancy. Back in 1988, the limit was five dollars. If someone’s drawer was wrong by more than five bucks, then that person got fired on the spot.
Yes, but…
What if an accomplice marked a twenty in the same way and bought something with it. Then you come along and use an unmarked ten, then claim that you gave a twenty and show your wallet full of marked notes as proof. Saw this on the TV show The Real Hustle.
:eek: Damn. Back in my cashiering days at a book store, I had one memorable night when my till was over by something like fifty bucks. My manager and I spent about two hours going over all my receipts and card transactions trying to figure where it had come from and we never did. It had never until just now occurred to me that it could have been argued that I was trying to scam something and just screwed it up. Dodged a bullet there.
many many years ago i worked in a fast food place and enjoyed working in the kitchen/prep part, because i got to chat up the cute girls working there, and also because i basically didn’t want to deal with customers. but after a few months of apparently constantly off drawers, the manager insisted i do cashier duties. well, i realized that the other cashiers were mostly just being sloppy, and so i was careful. my drawer was spot on, and i got promoted to cashier. which i hated.
as small conciliation, i start using the 20% off coupons we put out every weekend on a few orders an hour, and pocketing the discount amount. i don’t remember why this wasn’t easily spotted by the manager, but it wasn’t – it was a pretty bare-bones register so maybe that had something to do with it. i remember thinking i was tripling my hourly wage this way, and i didn’t get caught.
i think about it sometimes now though, and feel pretty bad about it. not only was i stealing from them, but screwing up their “analysis” (whatever that might have been) of the efficacy of the coupon promotion. i almost feel worse for screwing up the data, than for the probably $20/shift I was skimming… but that’s the scientist in me, i guess.
It really depends on the company and its policies, I think. The company I was working for at the time, General Cinema, was a movie chain, and like most movie chains, it hired a lot of teenagers, and it was the first job for a lot of those teens. The kids were pretty sloppy if they were left to their own devices, and so they needed an incentive to make change properly. At the time, matinee tickets were $3.50 and evening tickets were either $5.50 or $6.00, I can’t remember which. When a much anticipated movie opened, there was a LOT of cash in the box office drawers, and I imagine the kids were pretty tempted to just help themselves to a few bills here and there. I had been hired precisely because my previous job had given me a glowing reference for cash accuracy. At my previous job, we’d take in anywhere from $500-2000 in cash a day (there was only one shift), and my drawer was almost always balanced to the penny. At the theater, though, the whole cash intake system was fairly sloppy…for instance, the managers were not really as observant as they should have been about the amount of change in the drawers, nor did they scoop up large accumulations of cash in the box office. I know that the general manager was always trying to get a smoke in when his cashiers asked for change, and there was nothing the cashiers could really do about it if they had a drawer full of twenties and an angry line of customers while he was smoking like a chimney in his office. It’s a bad idea to have a lot of extra cash in a drawer because it’s tempting to both the cashier and to robbers. And it’s a bad idea to allow customers to wait in line for someone to come and give the cashier some change. So, all in all, the theater really needed some pretty strict guidelines about acceptable behavior, because the managers often didn’t have a clue.
I worked at the front gate of an amusement park in the late 1980’s. I sold tickets, and I think we would take in something like $60,000 per cashier per day. I would regularly be off, usually to the tune of $20,000 or more. It was the incredible amounts, and the overall acknowledgement of my stupefying ignorance, that saved me. I never stole a cent, almost never came up even, and was never suspected.
In an ironic twist, the fella I was dating, a manager, was found to be part of a scam operation: they would charge customers for park entrance tickets, but ring up $0 sales, then send the customers to certain ticket gates, where their fellow conspirators were, to be let into the park with the bogus admittance tickets.
He never involved me in his scheme, and the park never suspected me, for the same reasons: my huge daily underages and overall stupidity.
How did I get this job? My dad fixed cash registers at the park. I suppose if I had any sort of fraud skills, it would have been a perfect set-up. Missed opportunities, alas. baw haw!
