A gentleman come up to the sales counter and he wants to play the lottery.
He plays a single ticket for 50 cents, ... and pays in mostly pennies.
Congratulations, sir, I believe that is a new record: the profit on that transaction is less than my pay for the time it took to count your payment.
It always bothers me that the people making our lowest profit transactions seem to want to take the most of the cashier's time, like the folks buying scratchers who then take a full minute or longer to decide which one they want to buy. They always seem to take comically long pauses between choices, too.
I've read that some stores have taken to charging a "transaction fee", both to discourage people from making multiple transactions and to avoid having to raise prices to raise wages, and in my less charitable moments I've thought that customers should be charged directly for the cashier's time (instead of spreading the cost of the time-wasters among all customers hidden within the prices of stuff we sell).
As the old saying goes, time is money. And at minimum wage, five seconds is a penny.
He plays a single ticket for 50 cents, ... and pays in mostly pennies.
Congratulations, sir, I believe that is a new record: the profit on that transaction is less than my pay for the time it took to count your payment.
It always bothers me that the people making our lowest profit transactions seem to want to take the most of the cashier's time, like the folks buying scratchers who then take a full minute or longer to decide which one they want to buy. They always seem to take comically long pauses between choices, too.
I've read that some stores have taken to charging a "transaction fee", both to discourage people from making multiple transactions and to avoid having to raise prices to raise wages, and in my less charitable moments I've thought that customers should be charged directly for the cashier's time (instead of spreading the cost of the time-wasters among all customers hidden within the prices of stuff we sell).
As the old saying goes, time is money. And at minimum wage, five seconds is a penny.
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