Tweet
Quoth bob the goat
View Post
There's a whole specialty called "quick change artists". Some of them are reformed, and now put their skill to work for their former targets, testing cashiers to see if they will let someone who "sounds good at math" fast-talk them into giving the wrong change.
It amazes me how BAD at math most people are. Wait, not math: arithmetic. I used to believe myself average in that: a little below average in arithmetic, but above average on actual math. Turns out I am #%^$ing amazing at arithmetic.
The company I work for recently (I mean, more than a year ago) upgraded to a new computer controlled safe. It generates reports that will tell you, shift by shift, exactly how much each employee dropped and exactly how much each employee vended. If a shift ever has one employee taking over a drawer after another employee has been ringing on it, the outgoing employee conts the drawer (and the incoming employee verifies that count) and runs a report on the register that shows how much was rung up (and what portion of that was cash sales). Thus it is possible to check if the drawer had the proper amount of money in it at the time of hand off, and therefore how much of any overage or shortage belongs to which employee during that shift.
Except that the forms for those calculations haven't been changed from the old safes. So nobody knew how to work that out now that we are using the new safes. And when I say "nobody", I mean none of the 8 managers of stores in our group (or their Assistant Managers either), their boss, and apparently not any of the 9 other bosses like her in our regional office (nor the managers under them) nor anyone else in the regional office.
I can forgive the regional office people: they likely have never seen a report from the registers. they know what some manual says it will say, but they don't know what it actually does say.
I found out this was a question when my manager complained that her boss was still unable to answer that question, dispite having been asked "weeks ago". That's when I said that I had worked it out one morning while doing the paperwork. One drawer had come up very short, and I needed to know which cashier was responsible for that (which actually helped me find the mistake causing it), so I worked it out.
I worked it out again for her in less than five minutes, spent 10 minutes writing it down in a clear and attractive way, then spent 30 minutes explaining it to her so she could explain it to her boss. Finally we decided to just have her boss tell everyone that they could ask me.
I agree: if you can't do change in your head, you shouldn't be allowed to work with money. Unfortunately, it appears that enforcing that rule would leave us with only about 1000 cashiers to serve every business in the United States.
Comment