Ya know … In the case of Cowgirl’s $1000 bill incident, and Thea’s double $100 bill incident … I can’t help but think:
That’s gotta be the fastest way to pass of counterfeit bills, especially to people who are busy and (maybe) not adequately trained in being able to spot them.
As for SPOGGA … YOUR JOB SUCKS! You should have asked the lady if you could give her BEANS in return, in lieu of proper change. 
In all honesty people I quite enjoy my job, when I’m out there trudging the cold lonely streets there are no supervisors/bosses/managers to hassle me [just the occasional prick of a customer]
The woman referred to here is a toffee nosed twat, one of those people who reckons that 'cos she lives in a 3/4 million £ house and has megga bucks in the bank then she is FAR better than I am, a humble postie.
Well she isn’t, she is a prat of the first order.
It’s surprising the number of people that seem to think I just stroll into the sorting office, pick up a bag of mail and saunter out again. They don’t realise that all mail which doesn’t carry a post code [ZIP to Americans] has to be sorted by hand and this takes a hell of a lot of our time up.
They also don’t realise that I/we have to prepare our mail for delivery and this [at this time of year] can take up to 2 hours, the throwing off into each houses individual slot, the banding up, the packing etc.
As a positive side to the above encounter I was given quite a lot of cash/booze/chocs/biscuits so much so that I had to go back to the individual houses to pick it all up after I’d finished work as I could not fit the goodies into my bag. The cash on the other hand fitted easily into my greedy little sweaty palm and from there a rapid transfer to my pocket was effected.
LOLA: It’s Whalley Range, a well known run down decrepit area of Manchester which is frequented by by whores/pimps/junkies/muggers/and assorted asswipes.
Off to work very shortly…I wonder what delights the day has in store for moi.?
Oops, sorry. I visited him there once.Only once. He’s moved to Birmingham now, the lunatic.
This really doesn’t wash with me. The last time I checked, the entire Western world was using the Hindo-Arabic system of numbers. The price is displayed on a little monitor clearly visible to the customer.The numbers 15.72 look the same whether you speak English, Spanish or Tagalog. So do the numbers 20 and 100. So, if your total is 15.72, you hand the cashier the bill with the big 20 on it. If I were in Mexico, and I made a purchase that totaled 281 pesos, I could hand the cashier a 500 peso note (or however the paper currency is numbered) and expect 219 pesos in change. (I do know how to count to ten in Spanish, so any coins I could probably hash out fairly easily as to their denominations).
Lynn (crude example, because I don’t know how paper money south of the border in enumerated)
If I was shopping for someone else, and all I had on me was 1000 peso notes, and my purchases came to less than 250 pesos each, what would happen would be this- pay the cashier with the 1000 peso note, oberve that the cashier has given me all of her larger denomination peso notes as change, pay for the second purchase with one of the notes she gave me as change, take the second large note back to the person I was shopping for, along with the receipt, explain that the cashier didn’t have enough change and ask them to pay me back. My beef is really that this woman handed me a second hundred for a small purchase after she had just watched me all but wipe out my drawer. Simply paying attention to what is going on around you won’t overcome language barriers, but it can make them a lot less difficult to work around.
Also, I will never understand why Wally World starts cashiers off with such small amounts of change when it is so common for people to want to pay for smal purchases with large bills. It leave the cashier with the option of either sending a message to the CSM and hoping to hell she arrives with the needed change before the customers in line start screaming, go to the podium, where there is frequently no CSM available to help, or scurry around to other registers in hope of finding another cashier who can break the bill. It’s a bad situation, and seems like it would constitute a security risk.
Also, it wasn’t really me she was putting out, it was the people in line behind her, backed out all the way to the main aisle. If there were nobody waiting, it wouldn’t have been a problem for me to bop over to another register, but I was really hoping she would pay me with one of the bills I had just given her in change because it would have saved time and not kept the other customers waiting.
I don’t mind bending over backwards to give good service to a customer, but when other customers are being inconvenienced, then I start to have a problem with it.
Oh, I’m not excusing her. But I’ve seen it happen with enough English-speaking people to know it’s pretty common.
I don’t understand many of Wal*Mart’s business decisions, either, and the ones I DO understand, I generally don’t like. I’d venture to guess that the reason they start the individual drawers with such a small float is that they get interest on all the money that’s deposited. If money is in the drawers, it’s NOT drawing interest.
Nothing personal, but I try to avoid WallyWorld for many reasons. I believe that I haven’t set foot in one since they decided not to carry RU-486 (the “morning after” pill). This does cause me some inconvenience, but I really don’t like the corporation.
Actually, I think keeping the tills small is a sensible way to control cash, especially when it’s in the hands of minimum wage slaves that may or may not have good math skills, and which may or may not be trustworthy. If you ask them always to drop $20 bills and larger into a secure drop safe, then it’s virtually certain that a manager will be called to personally investigate $100 bills ('cos that is a common way to pass counterfeits — though nominally, the manager is called to “make change”). It also means the employee is not confronted with a drawer full of temptation and the manager can cruise by every hour or so and skim out the large bills. It also makes the tills a little bit quicker to count down at shift change. Further, it means that anybody trying to do a grab ‘n’ run at a cash register won’t make off with more than a few hundred bucks; all the big stuff is in a drop safe or some such.
I’m not a department store manager, but it seems to make sense.
Keep finding the stupid ones, spogga. They make for good reading. 
FISH
Um, actually, at the end of the shift, or even at lunchtime, it isn’t unusual for a cashier to have literally thousands in the drawer. I’ve ended up with so many twenties that they would barely fit into the space in the drawer, and we get hundreds handed to us all day/night long.
We aren’t asked to drop our larger bills, and (and this really pisses me and all the other cashiers off) we aren’t allowed to count our tills at the end of the shift, which means that if the cash office makes a mistake and says we’re short/over (more commonly short), we have no way of backing ourselves and showing our count is correct. Which means we have no recourse if it comes to disciplinary action. The reason for this is that Wal-Mart assumes that if we are over, we will pocket the overage. Apparently they have never heard of a blind count, and cannot grok the concept of having a supervisor or another employee observe the count.
Also, as for the “grab and run” issue, Wally World has in interesting way of dealing with it. When I first started work there, we took our cash and counted it down and placed it in the tills at a counter behind the customer service desk, next to the cash office. A fairly secure location. Then they started having us do this at the CSM podium- a much less secure location. I voiced my concerns to more than one manager about the safety issues involved with this, because we were out in the open. Now we have to do it at the register. Which means if we are replacing another cashier, we either have to set the till on the bag carousel or balance it on top of the divider that separates the cash register from the checkout line behind. So, if Wal-Mart is concerned with the security of the cash, they use some extremely counterproductive methods to protect it. The places where we count our money and put it in our tills at the beginning of the shift is becoming progressively less secure.
Oh, and Lynn, I try to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart, and actively encourage boycotting them whenever possible. Don’t agree with you about the RU-486 issue, being a very pro-life (as in human life begins when egg and sperm shake hands and say howdy) type person, but if refusing to do business with a particular company on ethical or moral grounds is your cup of tea, I could give you a list of reasons not to shop at Wal-Mart so long, you’d still be reading it when Christ returns, Cthulhu rises, Lord Meitreya makes his appearance, the twelfth Caliph drops in for coffee, or the sun goes supernova.
or is it the Twelfth Imam? my Islamic eschatology is a little rusty…
Oh, the RU-486 issue is just one of many that makes me grit my teeth about WM. I don’t like the fact that they move into small towns and undercut the local businesses until said businesses go bankrupt, I don’t like the way they treat their workers (including the anti-union stuff), I don’t like the way that they wave the American flag yet buy so much stuff that’s made overseas, I don’t like their extra-narrow aisles…I have LOTS of issues with Wal*Mart. About the only thing that I DO like about them is that they were one of the first places to have electric carts for people who, like me, are unable to walk long distances all in one go. And now other stores (especially Target) also have those carts, so I can go elsewhere.
Good grief, Thea Logica. If that’s how Wal*Mart handles their cash, they’re just begging to be ripped off. Sounds to me like some manager has decided it costs too much in labor to handle cash securely.
Still, I don’t see how starting the registers with hundreds of dollars in loose bills — just so a starting cashier can easily break a $100 bill — makes the problem any better.
Anyway, /endhijack.
FISH
FishWell, I don’t know how many hundreds you have in mind, but conidering the fact that for the first half hour or so of a shift, it is not an uncommon occurrence for a cashier’s float to be wiped out in a single transaction, I think starting us off with maybe $2-300 so we can have some tens and twenties in case one of our first few customers hands us a hundred for a five or ten dollar purchase (and I usually see a couple of these every day) would not be unreasonable. Having a cashier running around with a $100 bill in her hand frantically trying to get change for it is probably more of a security risk than having enough bills in the drawer to break it. Of course, then it’s the customer’s money that’s at risk, not Wal-Mart’s, so I guess that makes it OK. And if the cashier is injured in the process of being robbed, well, Wal-Mart is well known for denying workman’s comp claims, so I guess they wouldn’t be losing anything that way either.
Oh, and I firmly believe that honest employers trust their employees until they prove themselves untrustworthy. To put a hundred people at risk (not to mention the inconvenience of the customers waiting in line) because one of them might skim a twenty, to deny the entire front-end staff the right to know how much money is in their drop at the end of a shift because one dishonest person might pocket the overage, thus giving them no recourse if the cash office is in error, is a mark of a dishonest employer. Honest people tend to expect others to be honest until they have evidence to the contrary. Dishonest people tend to expect others to be dishonest even when there is no evidence of dishonesty.
A blind count, in which the cashier knows what is in the till, but doesn’t know how much is supposed to be there, would serve the purpose of making sure the employee can’t pocket overage while at the same time giving them recourse in the event that the cash office makes a mistake. Unless the cash office personnel know how to hack into the computer system (and the ones at my store aren’t that bright) and alter the transaction records, a simple comparision of the cashier’s count with the printout of the computer record would reveal if the cashier was short or if the cash office people needed to brush up on their math skills.
Also, having a larger float to start with wouldn’t really be that much of a risk as far as either employee theft or “grab and run” robberies are concerned. Employee theft can be handled by making the cashiers accountable for what is in the bag they drop at the end of the shift- a consistent pattern of shortages might mean a dishonest employee, and the risk of robbery is much greater at the end of the shift when the cashier is going to have a big ol’ honkin’ wad of hundreds, as well as twenties, tens and fives. Starting someone off with a few tens and twenties to make change with isn’t going to increase the risk of cash being made off with.
I think you’re right about some manager thinking it costs to much in labor costs to handle cash securely. Every minute we spend counting our float and walking from the place we count it to the register is a minute we’re not taking money from customers and putting it into that till. So, if we’re setting our tills up at the register while waiting for the outgoing cashier to finish up that last transaction before going to lunch, there’s a whole one hundred and twenty more seconds per cashier that is being spent collecting money rather than in a secure place setting up the till, not to mention the few pennies of wages that are being paid out in non-revenue producing labor. Multiply it by a couple hundred cashiers per day, and over time it adds up to a pretty fair chunk of change.
Probably wouldn’t seem like much compared to the million a month my store pulls down in profits, but Wal-Mart is extremely petty when it comes to the possiblity of losing a few nickels and dimes here or there. If an employee accidentally picks up some overtime over the course of a pay period by punching in a minute early here, punching out a couple of minutes late there, they make lists of people who have to be sent home early or take an extra ten or fifteen minutes of unpaid lunch break in order to avoid paying them an extra two or three dollars.
BTW, I just filled out an application at Blockbuster. Won’t make as much per hour, but I can make up the shortfall by working a few more hours per week in a much less stressful environment. I would probably hate my job a lot less if I was out on the sales floor, and have been begging for six months to be transferred, but they keep telling me “there are no openings”. Meanwhile, all departments are screaming that they’re shorthanded, customers bitch constantly that they can’t get help on the sales floor, and I’m stuck wrecking my back behind a cash register.
People gave you liquor and cash!??! Wow. I was going to give my mailman a package of homemade cocoa mix, but now I feel cheap.
cocoa mix ?
Who the hell delivers your mail ?
** voguevixen ** Don’t feel cheap, cocoa mix? sheesh!!!
Yeah, feel cheap!!
No, seriously, I think the practice of giving posties cash/booze etc is something that is peculiar to the UK so whatever you give your postie will be appreciated.
It shows that at least you have thought of him out in all weathers, braving the elements to deliver your mail, getting up at the crack of dawn [or before] but in all honesty ** COCOA MIX **
When I was a kid, my Mom gave cookies to the Postman* for Christmas. But the practice has mostly died out here in the U.S.
*Who, like me and not my father, had red hair. Hmmmm…
I think it’s actually illegal to give the postal people money in the US, but they are allowed to accept things with a value of less than $20 or something. I’m guessing most people don’t give him squat, so I don’t feel that bad.
One presumes that you have heard the story of the retiring postman who got a surprise for breakfast?
I have an update folks.
Yesterday it was hissing down, I arrive at Mrs Boots [honestly that is her name] door and it swings open.
“Have you got it”
“What”
“That letter”
“No”
“Why”
“Because Mrs Boot you have not paid the surcharge”
“Well I’ll pay it now”
“To late ma’am”
“Well where is it”
“On it’s way to Belfast”
“What for”
“Because that’s where all undeliverable mail goes to for returning to sender or shredding”
“That’s not good enough, I want it”
“With respect Mrs Boot, I’m wet, cold, hungry, thirsty and tired, I’ve been up since 4 and have no intention of standing here debating the issue, here is our office phone number, ask for the Delivery Office Manager and argue it with him”
hopefully that is the end of the matter, it is certainly the end of the card.
Major nitpick.
RU-486 is most definitely not the “morning after” pill. RU-486 is the Roussell-Uclaf “abortion” pill. It consists of Mifepristone and is used in conjuction with another drug as a medical abortion (drug induced, not surgical).
The “morning after pill” is actually nothing but a high dosage of standard birth control pills. Wal-Mart doesn’t sell them as emergency contraception, meaning you can’t just go in there and get four or eight pills from them, but a savvy doctor can easily write up a prescription for 1 month worth of birth control and give the patient instructions on which of the pills to take, how many, and how far apart.
Calling RU-486 (the French abortion pill) the ‘morning after pill’ just gives more (wrong) ammuntion to the people who call Emergency Contraception an abortifacient and think that EC too should be illegal.
:smack: You’re right, catsix, and the worst of this is that I DO know the difference. Or at least I did, once upon a time. It doesn’t mean quite as much to me now, because I’ve been spayed (had my ovaries and uterus removed, really) but I used to keep up on all sorts of BC options, even after I’d had my tubes tied. I don’t keep up with it as much now.