If my total is say 99.25 I like to hand the clerk a hundred and a quarter, so I can get back whole bills. The lower the cent amount the more I like it, once was given ninety something cents in change in nickels:mad:
It seems quite a few clerks find this bizarre, possibly shadey, or it freezes them up like deer in the headlights. They say you gave me too much money, and hand me back the quarter.
Am I that weird? Do most customers not do this?
In my past experience working as a cashier, I would give the customer change depending on what I had left in the register. Ones were a very common thing to run out of frequently on a busy day, and once that happened, I had to call over the grumpy manager. So that may very well be the source of the problem. I understood the look of frustration on the customers face when I gave them two nickels, five pennies, a dime, and my last three quarters, though =P
I do it all the time (and not just with change to round out to whole dollars, but if something is, say, $5.15, I might give $10.25 if I don’t have 15 cents exactly, so I just get a fiver and a dime back instead of four singles, three quarters, and a dime if I had just paid $10), and I half-expect cashiers to look at me puzzled but I’ve never had an issue around here. I think people must do it commonly around these parts.
I generally do this too, but in a case like the OP’s I’d hand over 100.25 and say something like “I’ve got the 25 cents if that makes it easier for you”.
FWIW I do this sort of thing too; mostly cashiers go along with it. Sometimes I get the deer in the headlights look too, and my impression is that it’s mainly with young cashiers, esp. ones who seem to be vacation season temps.
My personal theory is that young people are not used to doing mental arithmetic in their daily life anymore, so 10.35 € - 0.50 € = 9.85 € (the sum I am paying) isn’t so blindingly obvious to them as it is to me.
Well it isn’t any harder for cashiers to round up - it has been a long time since I’ve been a cashier, but this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence - I’d say more than 1% for sure, but hard to say - as even then most of my stuff wasn’t cash.
I have only very rarely run into someone who looked perplexed.
The cashier doesn’t figure out the change - they type in what is given to them. It tells them what to give back. This is the case even when I had to buy a cash register myself for a stand I was running.
If for some reason the cashier doesn’t get what you are doing - they are an idiot. Maybe the first time it happens to them they won’t quite grasp it, but as soon as the thing says “$4.00” in change instead of whatever - a light should go off.
It’s just as easy to them to type in $15.25 as it is $15.00 (ok some have a .00 key, but really doesn’t matter - as it’s all muscle memory). If for some reason I didn’t have the ability to return the correct change in a normal way - I’d say “sorry but I’m out of (or low on) whatever.”
You shouldn’t be met with an exact stare.
Perhaps you are suggesting by the way you presenting the money that you are doing something unusual - and maybe that is throwing them off. This isn’t an unusual thing you are doing. I don’t use cash as much, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done this two - four times or so a month - I don’t recall having a problem.
Now when I worked as a cashier - it was always in places with relatively high average purchase amounts. If be curious about those that work in places like fast food and stuff.
Is this stuff really that uncommon? I can’t imagine that your average McDonalds cashier doesn’t run into this at least once a day.
In my mind:
I can’t remember a single time (or think of many examples) - that such an action on the part of a customer caused (or would cause) me a problem. Many times items are sold in x.99 format - so that it is pretty normal for the price to be on the low end in cents. This only saves the cashier work in most cases.
Also - make sure it is obvious that you are giving them the money BEFORE they type it in. Don’t try this move (“oh wait I have a quarter”) after they’ve already opened their drawer - that is rude and is something retailers (sometimes) teach their staff to be on the lookout for as far as quick change artists go. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this with people you are familiar with or that obviously know their way around a cash register, but you really should expect a minimum wage employee to have to navigate such a transaction.
The only time I really get a confused look from a cashier, is when I hand them the extra change after they have already entered the amount tendered into register.
Cashier: “That’ll be $5.15”
I hand them a ten dollar bill and they input $10.00 into the register.
Me: “Oh, I have a quarter”
Cashier: “Umm”
I seems that younger cashiers don’t know how to “count back” change and rely solely on the cash register, so they get thrown off having to actually count.
I think some of it might be a misunderstanding about how a register balances when it’s closed out. An inexperienced cashier might be afraid of doing anything that wasn’t recorded in the software thinking that it means that the amounts won’t balance. Of course, it doesn’t make any difference as long as the correct amounts are actually given and received. That said, I agree that the “oh, I have a quarter” once the drawer has opened can be rude.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that it was ninety-five cents.
Keep in mind that a cashier’s job is to process customers as fast as possible, and that a cashier in any kind of fast-paced business is doing hundreds of transactions a day. This is how cashiers are trained these days, and it’s one of the metrics that decides whether they get to keep their job - for example, in the store I work at, cashiers are expected to meet an “efficiency standard” which is determined by the number of items scanned in per minute over the course of their shift, and you can get your hours cut or face disciplinary action if you’re not generating enough scans per minute. Anything that interrupts the routine is going to trip up and/or delay someone who’s working under those conditions.
With today’s digital POS registers, the cashier keys in the amount tendered for cash transactions and the computer does the math and provides the amount of change to be given. Because the cashier is expected to work as fast as possible, a lot of the time it works out that he or she keys in the tender and finalizes the transaction in the period between when you, the customer, hand them a bill and when you decide to fish in your pocket and hand them an additional 37 cents to round out the change, they’re going to have to stop for at least a second and calculate what they now owe you instead of operating automatically like they’ve been trained to. It’s not a matter of “the kids these days” being thick - cashiers are not trained or expected to do math in their heads, because it is inefficient and less accurate than letting the computer to the job for them, and so when they actually have to do so it throws them off.
It’s not just inexperienced cashiers- some people just don’t understand how it works. You wouldn’t believe how many experienced cashiers I worked with who would freak out if they entered $100 as the amount tendered instead of $10 thinking they would be short. And no matter how many times they saw that it worked out fine as long as they gave the correct change, they had the same reaction the next time it happened.
[German POV]
I usually do this - and usually without puzzled looks by the cashier. If I don’t round up, often the cashier will ask for such round-up money to manage his coin-stock.
If I have to pay e.g. 18.55 EUR and I give a 20 EUR note, often the cashier would ask if I have an extra 5 cents.
This is what I suspect is going on with the OP. It’s hard for me to believe there’s still a cash register in use today the doesn’t figure the cash back for the employee.
And frankly, management doesn’t really want their entry level employees doing “math” anyway. Just be an obedient little drone and do what the cash register tells ya to do.
It’s not uncommon here to encounter checkout operators who themselves will seek to simplify the change to be given, presumably because of a lack of coins in their till. For a $20.10 purchase and a proffered $50 note in payment, the response is likely to be “do you have the ten cents?”
Wait, what?
Why is it rude? And what is there to look out for?
Let me see if I can answer a lot…
Ok it was mostly nickels and SOME pennies bienville.
I am not waiting until the register is opened, but I do have to wait for the total. I have had cashiers ASSUME they knew what bill I would use, before I ever went in my pocket so that can be an issue at play.(19 something total he is gonna use a twenty, nope I only have a hundred)
And yes rarely a clerk is grateful for change.
Here’s Penn and Teller showing one example of a quick-change scam: basically you keep the cashier confused by changing the amount of money involved in the transaction at key points, and it’s very easy for even a smart cashier to give the wrong amount of change.
As a former cashier lo these many years ago, it isn’t so much the guy who has a quarter. It’s the guy who gives you a quarter, three dimes, a nickel, and a Panamanian half dollar because he wants a two dollar bill and three potatoes back in change, and then he acts like you’re a moron if you don’t get it.
Wait - russet, or Yukon gold?
You don’t know? Moron.