I had several cashiering jobs where it was my responsibility to z out the register. It was almost always accurate. We weren’t stoned, which might make a difference.
I wonder how many people understand the phrase “z out the register”. And also why it’s called that? You could probably guess from the context here.
(I worked for a company that wrote cash register software, so I immediately understand the phrase.)
I know it from an episode of King of Queens. (Joke starts midway through this clip, continues in the next one.)
From what I’ve seen as an overexperienced tourist in Japan, most business establishments have a register that automatically dispenses the correct change. No doubt machines can still screw up, but it’s certain to be far less common than the errors by a human.
came here to say that. …you were taught correctly.
I thought that was my super power.
This happens to me approximately once a year. I always give back the money. The last time the guy gave me too much and I said “The total was 82.15.” He stared at me like I’d gone insane. I shrugged and left. Later I realized that I should have said “You gave me too much.” Oh well, next time I’ll know.
If you really want to exasperate a cashier, dig for and add random change not matching the total to your cash. Priceless looks.
Let me emphasize that it was his inability to look at two fives, a ten and some loose change and not see instantly that it exceeded the twenty I had given him. That’s what horrified me. It never would have occurred to me to use a credit card for such a timy purchase. I actually had a five in my p[ocket, but I am trying to collect fives to use as tips for delivery people who are keeping me alive.
Once, when working for a banking company (must be over 20 years ago now), we had a customer who was in to get a loan to buy all new cash registers. He had 3 fast-food restaurants, with about 5 registers apiece. He wanted to replace them all with newer ones, where the clerk entered the amount paid and the register calculated the amount of change to give. And back then, such fancy registers were very expensive.
He said that despite training, employees in a hurry kept making mistakes. And while the mistakes were statistically equally likely to be in favor of the store or the customer, in reality they were more likely to hurt the store. Because customers were more likely to notice it when they were short-changed, and ask for a correction. But they either didn’t notice, or didn’t speak up when they got over-changed.
He had calculated that the new registers would greatly reduce incorrect change, and that plus reduced training time and clerks being able to serve customers faster, made it worthwhile to get all new registers. Even though it was expensive enough that he had to apply for a loan to do so.
So clerks mis-handling change has been happening for a long time.
I was once in line at a McDonalds. The guy in front of me placed his order and it came to $3.99. He gave the cashier a five dollar bill and clerk correctly gave him back a dollar and a penny. The customer said the change was wrong, he should get $2.01. The clerk argued with him briefly, then called the manager. The manager argued with him for a while, then exasperatedly just gave the guy an extra dollar. I was fairly offended that the guy got rewarded for his innumeracy.
I don’t understand. Don’t modern cash registers do basic math, and show the customer the result?
There’s a place to enter how much the customer paid, and the machine then does the math. I know this because I worked as a cashier at two places, and this was over a decade ago.
(I’m reminded of someone who complained on Yahoo about being constantly ripped off when they bought things at stores. I suspect they couldn’t do math. I wanted to say “use a card!”)
Yeah, that’s unusual.
I always count my change before I put it in my pocket. I’ve never been short-changed, but I’ve had several cashiers try to give me too much. The record was the guy who gave me an extra 20-pound note – at the then-current exchange rate that was 40 dollars…
Modern cash registers do this, and much much more. Pricing structures can be so automatic, and so varied, that neither cashier nor customer can figure out what happened.
They compute automatic discounts. Sale prices can be set up to begin at a certain future date and end at a certain date, so the data clerk can set that up ahead of time and the sale prices will take effect automatically at the right time.
Prices can be set up like “1 pkg. Chocolate Chip cookies for $3.89, 3 pkgs for $10.00.” When the cashier scans one, it rings up for $3.89. When the casher scans another one, it rings up for $3.89. When the cashier scans a third package, it rings up for $2.22.
Discounts can be defined for various products, or various classes of products. A discount can be a fixed dollars-and-cents amount off the regular price, or can be a discount percent off the regular price. If the customer has a “club card” or whatever they call it, certain items can get some kind of discount for that. Customer “categories” can be defined and customers in those categories can get a different discount. (Real life example: Some stores in New York defined a “New York Fire Department” customer category, and customers in that group got special discounts.)
You could define “gift packs”. For example, you could define a “gift pack” consisting of a bottle of certain kinds of wine, a loaf of French bread, and a block of Swiss cheese. Anyone buying that combination of items got some kind of discount.
Then you have store coupons. And you have manufacturer coupons, which work differently than store coupons. And you have those WIC coupons, which work yet another way. All of which are capable of defining various complex pricing structures.
Then you have various kinds of customs-designed store promotions, like the stores that gave customers “points” for their purchases and during a certain week before Thanksgiving, if you had enough points you could get a 12-pound turkey, and enough more points and you could get a 20-pound turkey. (Guess who wrote the custom module to implement all that?)
It goes on nigh-unto ad infinitum.
Pile a bunch of stuff like all that into your pricing structures, and much much more, and just try to get either the cashier or customer to understand just what each item costs.
Oh, and don’t forget sales tax computations. There are several ways this can be done, on top of which different items (like tobacco products or booze) may have additional layers to tax piled on, but customers who pay with food stamps get the sales tax removed for most items (most of which didn’t have tax in the first place).
Got all that?
And that’s just scratching the surface of the point-of-sale complexities. Then you have those above-mentioned Z-reports at the end of the day and more at the end of the month that compute all kinds of totals, broken out by sales department, by cashier or clerk (so their commissions can be computed), and separate sales tax reports (so you know how much to pay Mr. Taxman), and all the amounts customers paid by cash, credit cards, debit cards, food stamps, store credits, house charge account charges and payments, and on and on, not to mention creating files of all that information in the right formats to be imported into your QuickBooks app or various other accounting apps. (Guess who also wrote the customer modules to do all that too?)
Modern cash registers do basic math all right, and much more.
And even so, they sometimes get it wrong :eek: See the nearby thread about bias and rounding errors! That sometimes bit us too. Just let your receipt total be off by ONE STEENKIN PENNY in the wrong directions! Your customers will zero right in on that, like they have some kind of radar! (Right, Joey P?)
ETA: Not to mention that this is all done via complex software, and complex software can have outright bugs that can sometimes get things all kinds of wrong. (Guess who also did that now and then?) My favorite was the little bug (not my doing!) that occasionally crashed not only the register but the server in the back office, which then crashed ALL the registers and shut the whole store down.
That’s not a minor thing, either. By the time they got their server and registers back up, I was told, just being shut down for half an hour or so cost the store some $10,000.
It happened while that Thanksgiving Turkey add-on module was running, but the bug was in the underlying library software and not in the module I wrote (I’m pretty sure). But after it happened twice, would you believe the store management was pissed?
Then again, I once accompanied my wife on a business trip, went out to dinner with her and her colleagues, and when we split the bill at the end, it came to $25 a head. I had only $20 and $10 bills on me, so I jokingly asked one of them if he could give me “two 20s for a 10” while giving him a $10 bill. Without blinking, he gave me two $20 bills.
This is the part where I tell you my wife is a professor of mathematics, that this was an academic conference she was attending, and all of her colleagues were also PhD’s in mathematics.
“Maybe you intimidated him,” she said later.
“No, I think he was just that he was not thinking about what I was saying while understanding the meaning.”
Yup, luckily our store is small enough that if a customer is bickering with a cashier, I’ll make my way out to the store and sort of hover in the area. I’ll let the cashier handle it, but if the customer escalates things or the cashier can’t figure out what’s going on, I’m right there.
Besides, sometimes a brain fart by the cashier or customer is easier to sort out when a third party (myself) steps in. Between my experience doing just that and knowing some of the quirks of our specific registers, I can usually sort things out pretty quickly.
Sometimes it’s just easier to hand the person the extra dollar and get them moving along.
They do, but remember, garbage in/garbage out. If the cashier types in the wrong number for what you gave them, it’ll tell them the incorrect amount of change to return back to you. If you give them a twenty, but they enter $30, they’re going to hand you an extra ten bucks if they don’t notice it.
I had a customer who would do that constantly. She’d call in her grocery order (long story, but we’d put orders together for her) come in and pick them up, and within 10 minutes we knew we’d get a call from her wanting to know why she was charged so much. Even when we’d include a very detailed receipt, showing what she paid for each and every item, she’d still call back saying she was overcharged and sometimes would vaguely accuse us of doing it on purpose. It got to be a chore with her.
Eventually she disputed one of her credit card charges (over $200) because she got a single bad orange…and orange the we offered to 1)refund her for 2)give her credit for the next time she was here or 3)we offered to drive a brand new orange over to her house.
We won the dispute, but we told her, from this point on, we’d no longer do he shopping (and often deliver) for her. We explained her her that going forward, she needs to do her own shopping since ‘we don’t feel we’re doing a good enough job for her’.
A couple of years ago I got some cash from an ATM and got an older $20 bill, the ones that had the style of $1 bills, with the smaller portrait. Anyway, I went to a fast food place and bought lunch and handed the clerk the $20. He refused to accept it. I had to get him get his manager to explain to him that the bill was valid. I guess it shocks me to think that kids today may never have seen an older $5/$10/$20/$50/$100 bill. I could have sworn the mint made posters showing both styles of bills that stores could post.
A few years ago I paid cash for everything. I accumulated a lot of coins. Then I came up with a game. Before I got to the cash register I would see what change was in my pocket. When they showed the total I would figure out what to give so that I would end up with the fewest coins. Examples…
.55 - give a dollar and a nickel. Sometimes they gave the nickel back and gave me two dimes.
.53 - also give a nickel. This could get a stranger look.
.58 - This might also be giving a nickel. And when they give back a quarter, two dimes and two pennies, they wonder what you are doing. But, it’s basically trading two nickels for a dime. Usually in this case I wouldn’t do it - I got weird looks.