[QUOTE=Klaatu]
DDG, why don’t you just throw some pennys in your smock, throw one out every now and then, keep the customers happy, and quit sounding like a corporate shill.
[/QUOTE]
DDG isn’t a corporate shill. She’s doing her job to earn a living. And you’re being a Jerk why?
[QUOTE=Carol Stream]
DDG isn’t a corporate shill. She’s doing her job to earn a living. And you’re being a Jerk why?
[/QUOTE]
When DDG posts numbers on how many fucking pennies Walfuckingreens will lose if people get a free penny, she is being a corporate shill, it doesn’t effect her job at all.
Why in the flying fuck should DDG give a shit about Walgreens losing a few hundred grand in pennies, when their yearly profit is TENS OF BILLIONS!
And as far as being accused of being a jerk by you? I guess I am flattered.
Perhaps DDG should direct her ire toward asking for a raise, instead of being all self-righteous about people saying “Can you cover the penny?”
I can’t fucking believe how some people are whining about how “These fucking customers have the fucking gall to ask for a penny”.
Sweet Og, get fucking real.
But of course DDG will say “But I would get a raise, except we are losing so much money on pennies we can’t do it.”
You are an idiot.
Funny, I was just at Barnes & Noble and when I went to checkout they somehow accidentally charged me $0.02 instead of the correct total. Then they got it right and charged me the correct amount ($14.95 or something).
The 2 cents I got charged for nothing? They had no problem keeping that.
[QUOTE=elelle]
Shit, and Whoa! Who’d athunk a little issue of a simple cent would foment such bile and vitriol??? I guess this is the Straight Dope, where things can get pretty heated
[/QUOTE]
I think the heated responses are not about the penny itself but the sense of entitlement displayed by the OP and others in this thread.
I’m pretty amazed at the amount of people here who think the stores should give away money to spare them having to carrying around change. Yeah, it’s one cent. Look at the figures DDG posted. It adds up. At my store(grocery store), the plastic bags we use cost roughly a penny each. We’re constantly encouraged by management to fill the bags as much as possible to cut down on the amount of bags used. For bags that cost a penny. Stores look to cut expenses constantly because they are in business to make a profit.
If carrying change bothers some of you so much, why don’t you just switch to plastic? It’s beyond me why anyone uses cash anyway(aside from having a stash of emergency money), but that’s another thread.
On preview:
I don’t think anyone whined about “customers having the gall to ask for a penny”. It’s that the OP(and some other posters in this thread) seem to expect that if their total is 5.01, and they have 6.00, the cashier should throw that money in to prevent the customer having to carry around .99 in change. The OP’s act of looking around at the ground in an attempt to embarass the clerk into giving something he is not entitled to is both childish and assholish.
Also, the fact that DDG cares about how much money her company makes does not necessarily make her a corporate shill. There’s the fact that she has job security, for one. I personally care that my company is profitable because I’m both an employee and a stockholder. We also get quarterly bonuses based on the results of our inventories. And yet, I’m just a cashier, so our profit and loss doesn’t affect my life at all.
[QUOTE=Cartooniverse]
You want someone taking over $ 500,000.00 out of YOUR bank account every year?
[/QUOTE]
Once more, with perspective. Walgreens FY04 revenue was $37.5 billion. $500K is .000013% if I did my math right. Anybody in this thread who wants .000013% of my annual income, please send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll cut you a check for $1.20.
And as I pointed out, It could just as easile pile up in the company’s favor since lots of people walk away from their two or three pennies in change. Let’s not just assume that universal rounding always puts the business at a loss. If that was true, Australian businesses would have been in a world of hurt after eliminating the one and two cent pieces in 1992.
[QUOTE=Klaatu]
DDG, why don’t you just throw some pennys in your smock, throw one out every now and then, keep the customers happy, and quit sounding like a corporate shill.
You are a fucking cashier, not the chief accountant.
In 2006, Walgreens sales were 47 fucking billion dollars from over 5000 stores and profited over a billion and a half, so who gives a fuck. You? Are you bucking for assistant manager? :rolleyes:
ETA: And if those figures are off a bit, it’s not enough to justify your “Fuck You Customer” attitude. Close enough.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, guess what, genius? I’m enrolled in the Corporate Profit-sharing Program, which goes towards my retirement in about 15 years or so, which means that every penny I have to donate to Karl Gauss so he won’t have to carry around 99 cents in his pocket comes out of MY fucking pocket.
Maybe you should withhold your idiotic and pointless “corporate shill” vitriol until you get, like, some actual facts or something. :rolleyes:
I fail to see how refusing to donate money towards the cause of “Karl Gauss Ltd.” means I have a “fuck you, customer” attitude. The phrase “the customer is always right” most emphatically DOES NOT mean that the customer has the right to demand freebies from the retailer, who is there to sell things, and make a profit, not donate things and NOT make a profit. Helloooo? We have on the one hand “capitalism”, and on the other hand “charity”. One of these things is not like the other.
Question: let’s say you’re having a garage sale in your driveway, having decided to clean out the basement. And some customer asks YOU to donate HIM a penny so you won’t have to give him 99 cents in change. Are you going to comply? Maybe you don’t care if he ever comes back, so you don’t. Fine, but what if you decide that this garage sale thing is making so much money that you decide to have one twice a year (and I know a lot of people who do this, and they do make some serious money at it, considering). So, THEN are you gonna give Karl Gauss a penny? And what about the 5 or 10 more Karl Gausses in line, who are ALSO going to ask you to donate them a penny? Do the math; if you keep this up, pretty soon you’ll have donated the cost of one of those Meat Loaf t-shirts going for a quarter, which would have been a quarter that could have gone into your pocket. Happy about the concept? No? Why, you corporate shill, you. :rolleyes:
I just bought some booze and was a penny short. The kind woman behind the counter put it in for me.
People who get angry because a cashier won’t give them a penny baffle me. Those people might try learning the cashier’s name to include in a letter of complaint to the head office; I’d like to see the reply that might garner.
[QUOTE=Patty O’Furniture]
Once more, with perspective. Walgreens FY04 revenue was $37.5 billion. $500K is .000013% if I did my math right. Anybody in this thread who wants .000013% of my annual income, please send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll cut you a check for $1.20.<snip>
[/QUOTE]
Okay. Could you make that in Canadian dollars, though? I don’t want to take a loss. 
A penny is no big deal? I’ve seen a cashier fired for doing what the OP asked. Why? It wasn’t her money. She “misappropriated a company asset”. She was new, and did not recognize the District Loss Prevention Manager standing near her lane. He really didn’t want to fire someone over a penny, but if he hadn’t, that would have made him complicit, and he could be fired. I’ve worked for several places that are in fact that draconian with their cash policy. I’ve also had customers ask me to cover as much as five dollars. Fuck that. Why should I give you my hard earned money, or risk losing my job? I needed those crappy jobs, and I’m wasn’t about to get fired for someone else’s convenience. If you don’t want a pocket full of change, keep a little with you. If you don’t, shut your pie hole.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Well, if the owner of the place gives you a penny, it is his to give. If a clerk gives you a penny, it is NOT his to give. (Why does this need explaining?)
[/QUOTE]
Ah right I get you now. I’m one of the owners of the place, hence the confusion. I was making a point about the general to-ing and fro-ing of pennies and other lower coins. I’d estimate we get more people not wanting their shrapnel than we let off who don’t have exact change. If the person’s bill comes to €300.02 I’m not to worried about the 2c. That’s a valid but separate point over whether I want my staff to let people off the 2c. (It needed explaining because you didn’t make yourself clear the first time around).
[QUOTE=9thFloor]
Funny, I was just at Barnes & Noble and when I went to checkout they somehow accidentally charged me $0.02 instead of the correct total. Then they got it right and charged me the correct amount ($14.95 or something).
The 2 cents I got charged for nothing? They had no problem keeping that.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t get it…you PAID them the $0.02 that was rung up in error?? If so, why? If not, I don’t get how they “kept the 2 cents”. 
My take on this whole rant is that a business is just that: a business. Not a charity. Meaning they are there to make money, not give it away.
If someone was doing that theatrical scrounging for change while I was waiting in line, I’d probably kick his fucking head into the counter. I doubt the store would hand over the video tape to the police or that a single other customer would claim to have seen it happen.
[QUOTE=Klaatu]
When DDG posts numbers on how many fucking pennies Walfuckingreens will lose if people get a free penny, she is being a corporate shill, it doesn’t effect her job at all.
[/QUOTE]
It’s a matter of principle. The beating up of an old woman doesn’t affect your job, either. Nor does the plight of starving children in Afghanistan. Does this mean that we can freely berate you if you choose to take a public stance on these issues?
This morning McDonalds accepted a couple of US pennies as part of my payment for breakfast. Glad the OP fellow was not at the till.
looks around furtively
OK, I’m not entirely sure I should be jumping back into this…
Just to clarify my position, should anyone care. I don’t think a cashier is obligated to spot the customer a couple of (the cashier’s personal) pennies. If they want to, that’s quite neighborly of them.
However, I was just relaying my personal experience in retail, that is, that many more people refuse their change than people try to make exact change but come up a few cents short. In the end, the drawer was usually over to the tune of nearly a dollar in the gas station I worked at, 10 cents in most of the other establishments. Now, I never worked anywhere that had such Draconian cash control policies that if someone left behind 15 cents it hand to be rung up as a sale, so that extra money ended up in one of several places- in the Take a Penny tray, somewhere behind the counter, or in that extra space in the till where you keep your rolled change if you have any.
So I always had extra money to spot the customer IF he made a production out of searching for exact change. Now, I don’t think that’s stealing, because it’s not the store’s money. It was not exchanged for any goods or services provided by the store; it might have just as easily been “thrown in the car park” as one of my classmates used to do. Also, the comment most often heard as the customer refused their change (or their pennies, as some kept the silver) is “Keep it for the next guy who needs a penny.” So I did. And at the end of the night, even after giving out a few, I still had a drawer over a few cents. My employers didn’t care- better over than short- and most understood that quite a few people don’t keep their change.
Of course, YMMV. This is only true at establishments that handle a lot of cash, and sell inexpensive items. I doubt it’s true that the local electronics store has people trying to find that last penny while purchasing their computer.
So I understand the OP’s frustration at being refused a penny, because it sounds like he’s ranting about the types of stores where I’d be surprised if they didn’t have some extra change lying around. Maybe they have the crazy policies where refused change must be rung in as a sale, but if I were a cashier in those places, I’d probably save all the change till the end of my shift, spotting a penny here and there, until I could ring it in as one larger sale instead of 20 5 cent sales.
I’ve been working retail for over 6 years now. Until I switched to working in an airport branch, I never encountered anyone who told me to keep the change, or who had issues getting back 99 cents in change(although that rarely happened in and of itself). Working in an airport, I get enough people telling me to keep the change, that I can, on occasion toss out the odd penny. But if I run out and the come to 16.01, and the customer doesn't have any change? Yeah, they get .99 back. I feel bad, but that’ the way it goes.
Way back when I was in high school, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store. I was opening that day, and my first customer bought a stick of gum with a $100 bill.
He effectively wiped me out of my change, because at that time we didn’t stock the tills with $20 bills. The cashier supervisor was a little nonplussed when ten minutes after opening, I had to ask her for change.
The fact is, whether it’s a penny or a dime or a five dollar bill…you are not entitled to it. You may feel it’s a nuisance factor, in that case, pay by check or credit card.