It’s the turning coins into real money part that costs you time, or money.
I now mostly drop change into the ubiquitous tip jars. I don’t use cash often enough to make it worth my while to bring change from home. If I’m paying cash, my bills are already in my hand, it’s easiest to put the bills together and back in my pocket, then put the coins in the tip jar. It makes everything I buy with cash a little more expensive, but some cheap-ass somewhere is busy fondling his pennies, and the zinc lobby owns congress, so I’m stuck with this ludicrous system of currency.
Those of you who don’t pay with coins are missing out on a lot of fun. If your purchase is, say, $4.85. And you pay $5.10 (in order to receive one quarter in change), it now breaks the brains of about a third of all cashiers. They just don’t handle enough cash to understand.
In the above situation, they either give completely the wrong change, or laboriously count out the dime and nickel to bring it up to $5, then get another dime.
They seem to think my ability to add and subtract two numbers totalling 100 is witchcraft.
Frustrating a poorly paid clerk is fun to you? Wtf? I have a graduate degree in engineering and I can’t do arithmetic in my head. Kudos to you for having that skill though.
I used to insist on a coin pouch for my wallet, since I’m one of the few people (I guess) who actually tries to spend coins as I receive them. They are getting hard to find.
In any case, like many of you I hardly ever use cash nowadays, so I rarely get any coins in change. Unlike, say, ten years ago when I would use cash all the time.
Years (decades?) back I used to accumulate coins, and every few weeks I would empty my pocket of most of it. Sometimes there would be $5 in coins there.
Now I new carry coins; the few times when I pay cash for anything and get a few coins as change I empty them from my pocket when I get home. Last year they opened an Aldi’s near me and I decided to check it out. I had to remember to pull a quarter out of where I keep my change* so I could get a cart.
*I keep telling myself that I need to collect the change that’s sitting in various containers around the house and take them with me next time I go some place with a CoinStar machine and exchange them for an Amazon gift card. But of course that never happens.
One good place I’ve discovered to spend excess coins: The self checkout machines at the supermarket. They’ll take any amount of any kind of coins — even pennies. Just drop all your coins in the slot and pay the balance with a credit card.
No, I don’t torture poorly paid clerks (or any clerks: I spent a lot of years working retail). I do experience that they are increasingly poorly trained as to how to handle cash, and increasingly befuddled by coins, which was the actual point of my post.
In real life, if they are confused I usually just explain why I’m doing what I’m doing, and if they give me the wrong change I correct them so their register still balances.
I said frustrate, not torture. That’s some silly hyperbole right there. When I ran cash registers for minimum wage I was not impressed by pendants trying to be clever and explaining things to me and “breaking my brain” and acting superior. I just wanted to get through the day. Please consider not doing that anymore.
I think you are reading my words with completely the wrong tone. I don’t know how to fix that. In my head, I find the whole situation amusing, but I am actually a pretty empathetic person and well aware that cashiers, no matter their training or math skills, are humans, and deal with them accordingly.
I’m sorry my attempt to be amusing upset you. Maybe pm me if you want to discuss it further so as not to derail the thread.
I’m not upset and I believe that you’re empathetic generally. Again, please consider that clerks do not find this helpful. This is from my personal experience.
I mean, in the example he’s paying in such a way that he gets one coin as change instead of two (and spends 1, leaving him net -2 coins relative to paying with a fiver. As the register does the math, he’s making the clerks job easier, provided they simply enter the total amount of currency given to them rather than figure out why they’ve been given that amount. He’s just expressing amusement that this formerly common and helpful behaviour produces slight befuddlement amongst the youngsters, much attempting to operate a rotary telephone would. In days of yore when I actually used cash, I did this all the time - add appropriate coinage to the paper money to make the change a rounder number, thereby reducing the amount of small coinage in my change pouch.
Those days are long gone, of course. In the vanishingly rare cases where I make a cash transaction the change goes into a pocket and then deposited into a cupholder in the car where it languishes for a year or two before being transferred to a windowsill where it languishes to this day. But I can’t actually remember the last time I made a cash purchase. When I last purchased a new wallet I put a $50 in it for emergencies, and it’s still there. I used to think that US currency conservatism was the height of idiocy. Now I think it’s irrelevant.
Anyway, to bring this back on topic, I use cash more than most it would seem. My house keeper wants cash when she’s here once a month. I’m often in bars where bands play and if there’s no cover I throw cash in a tip jar but more and more Venmo is an option. It’s Venmo or the equivalent between friends too. All of those situations with cash is currency.
It’s very rare that I get change anymore. When I do, I leave it on the counter in the little change dish except for quarters. I used to keep quarters in my car for parking meters but all of those seem to be moving to scanning a QR and paying digitally. I have maybe ten quarters at home that I use as tokens in a weird card game that I play with my buddies.
They do, but they don’t always know how to quickly and efficiently make change. I don’t know why. I suspect partly because it doesn’t happen often and partly because they don’t care, especially if they’re basically cashless in their own lives. People don’t always get thorough training on cash registers, which are sometimes quite complicated and specific. It may well be that employers specifically encourage them NOT to think, because the register’s math is better and they are scammers who will manipulate the change-making process to steal.
People really seem to have a tough time with the dollar barrier: they understand that 100−85 = 15, but not (without pausing to think about it) that 110–85 = 25. The first assumption when presenting the extra 10ȼ is that I have made a mistake, and if (as is common) they type an even dollar amount into the register, they don’t know how to remedy that.
Exactly none of which is a big deal, of course; just a sign of the times.
Or, as I already mentioned, their brain works differently than yours and they can’t do quick arithmetic in their heads. Such as me who is 60 years old, had a long career as an engineer and worked the cash register at two different jobs in my youth.
I am very, very good at quick estimations. I can guess most calculations within 10% which served me well because I could tell when a number didn’t look right and then would go back and do a calc to verify. I didn’t accuse people who don’t happen to have that skill of not caring.