A pet peeve of mine that’s been bugging me for some time now. I’m not sure just when this started happening, but I think it was just within the past few years.
When I was trained on cash handling and register usage, it was drilled into my head that the proper way to give a customer their change is to count it back to them, starting with their total and working up to what they gave you. This ensures that both you and the customer are sure that they’ve been given the correct change.
For instance, if someone bought a $5.26 item and paid for it with a $20 bill, I’d give them their change starting with the coins and counting up: “Five twenty-six, six,” as I drop $0.74 into their palm, “seven, eight, nine, ten,” as the dollar bills get counted back, “and twenty,” as the $10 bill finishes it all off.
For some reason, though, I haven’t run into a cashier who does this properly in — well, I’m honestly not sure how long, but certainly not the last few months — and it drives me up the wall. Not because I’m that anal about how money’s counted back to me, but simply because what seems to have become the common standard is obnoxiously inconvenient.
These days, they’ll just say something along the lines of, “Four seventy-four is your change,” and put the money in my hand — but they’ll put the money in the same way they say it. This ends up placing the bills in my hand first, and then the coins, so that suddenly I’m standing there with my wallet in my left hand and a small stack of bills in the right, with a pile of change sitting precariously on top. At this point, it’s almost impossible to move at all without dumping the coins all over the counter or the floor.
Doing it the correct way — that is, of course, how I was trained, and how I want it to be done — allows me to cup a couple fingers under the bills and around the change in my palm, slip the bills into my wallet, and then drop the change into my pocket. Now, though, I’m left standing in front of the register, feeling more than a little idiotic as I try to juggle wallet, bills, change, and whatever I’ve just bought without either holding up everyone behind me or dumping my money all over the place.
Drives. Me. Up. The. Wall.
When did this start being an acceptable way to give customers back their change? Do companies just not train their cashiers properly anymore?
(On a semi-related note, I noticed while I was tending the register at my old store that I was the only person there who made sure that all my bills were facing the same way in the stacks — face up, with the top of the head towards the right side of the drawer. Again, something that was drilled into my brain when I was being taught how to handle cash that seems to be completely ignored anymore.)
Kids today, I swear….
“Music (Deep Dish Dot Com)” by Madonna from the album Music (2000, 11:24).