trouble making change

[peter lena 8,634]

recently at the hardware store , had the clerk  , having to ask for help on return change , pretty scary , pete

[Pullstart 62,912]

It’s never taught anymore it seems, to count back UP to the amount paid over the amount charged…

[JimSraj 430]

Nothing new there Pete. 45 yrs ago I was running a poultry and seafood store. Most employees had to be taught how to count change. Sad, but true. 

[ri702bill 8,339]

1 hour ago, peter lena said:

pretty scary , pete

I went a week or so to my local Lowes for a quart of now-hard-to-find oil based primer. I did not need it tinted at that time, sanding and recoating white porch railings.

Yesrerday, I went with a large blue/gray paint chip from failed paint on the garage right when they opened to get the same primer, but tinted. The not-yet-old-enough-to-vote kid tells me that even though the label says it can be tinted, he has no formula......  I told him it's just PRIMER, not a top coat.... he balks. He starts whining that it will be too light- I tell him to "sneak up on it". Add the color, mix it and see what you got. if it's too light, add 1/3 more. Now he really pushes back. I tell him to MAN UP and JUST DO IT!!! So he goes off in a huff and mixed a perfectly acceptable color.......

Some employees are not capable of thinking outside their box.....

[WHX?? 48,828]

Nowadays the cash register tells how much change to give. With out that most clerks are lost. Doesn't help that using plastic instead of cash doesn't give newbie clerk practice. 

[peter lena 8,634]

@ri702bill  thinking outside the box , thats my middle name , if  I was stopped every time , I could not match up or replace anything , to original , would be pretty scary . seam to remember  doin that daily at work , very glad  to have picked up survival mode , back in the day , keep on adapting , pete

[JoeM 7,874]

I like going through the drive through and giving the person the exact change. Screws them up real bad! 

Too many goes in ta's! 

[peter lena 8,634]

@Joey Small Block   regularly talking to our grand  kids about , scewing up , making a mistake , has helped them realise its not the end of the world  , but and opportunity to learn from a screw up , emphasizing  learning to deal with it . now  they regularly tell us , that its no longer a problem . get ready , its tuff out there , grampa

[Rick3478 428]

Been on the other side of that.  Used to count change back up to customers all the time, but as they got younger it seems a lot are just confused by it.  For awhile I would go either way, trying to guess on a per customer basis which would work better, but finally just gave up on it and ended up just telling them how much the change is.  I don't think they are teaching basic math or business skills in school anymore.  Or at least no one seems to be learning...

[mrc 812]

deleted post

Edited August 15, 2023 by mrc

[JimSraj 430]

Well I’d say technology is behind the lack of knowledge in most of these cases but it wasn’t prevalent in the mid to late ‘70’s when I ran that market. Btw do you remember as many phone #s as you once did?  I know I don’t. 

[Handy Don 12,237]

1 hour ago, mrc said:

sad thing is these are the future leaders of our country.

 

Actually, these will not be the leaders. They will be the lemmings.

[8ntruck 7,016]

One of my sons got a summer job at a fast food store a number of years back.  They put him on the drive up window because he knew how to make change.

 

 

[Kenneth R Cluley 527]

Went to Lowes to get paint for outdoor project. Young guy at counter, by himself. I was not sure exactly how much I needed, probably a little over half gallon. Asked worker price for quart and for gallon. He says that since there are a little over three quarts in a gallon it would be cheaper to buy a gallon. Wife and I just stared at each other for a while. This is your job to mix paint and don't know # of quarts in a gallon?

[Sailman 1,291]

20 hours ago, ri702bill said:

 

Some employees are not capable of thinking outside their box.....

 

.......'er in my experience....most young employees......

[ri702bill 8,339]

Just now, Sailman said:

 

.......'er in my experience....most young employees......

Yes.... but I actually TRY not to judge the book by its cover. Sometimes though, I do not have to try for very long......

[Lee1977 6,666]

If you really want to mess up there mine, say the bill is $3.27 and you don't want a pocket full of change. give them a 5 dollar bill,.quarter and dime.

[wh500special 2,187]

You guys are brutal.

 

While it's possible that the clerk's inability to make change is a harbinger of the collapse of society, there may be other things at play.    Maybe they were nervous.  Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they were new and were still learning how to do the job efficiently.

 

Maybe their manager stuck them on the register with insufficient training.  That's pretty common in this day's "see one, do one, teach one" environment.

 

I took a LOT of math during my education and yet I don't remember being taught how to make change.  Maybe it happened sometime in elementary school as a means of removing some of the abstraction from arithmetic, but I don't recall it being any sort of formal lesson to learn for a career behind a cash register.  I would think it's more the responsibility of the clerk's manager or the store's proprietor to make sure the clerk is competent (or is capable of becoming competent) at the activity than it is for schools to teach this particular skill.  After that, it's like anything else that takes practice and repetition and the learning curve can be different for each person.

 

A huge chunk of my job is figuring out how to set up and "do the math" behind what gets churned out of our factory.  This involves easy stuff like addition/subtraction/multiplication/algebra/geometry/trigonometry but there is a lot of "real math" in a day too.  And yet I still have to take a few moments and think through how much change I am going to get back when I pay cash at the fast food place.  I'm just not practiced in that developed skill.

 

As I've gotten older I've often fallen into the trap of thinking that the younger generations aren't as good as we were when we were their age.  But as I watch my 16 year old daughter - who is way smarter than I ever was - make some of the dumbest mistakes imaginable I've come to realize that as a kid I was undoubtedly a complete idiot too.  And at a lot of things, I'm still that same idiot.  I might be unique in this.

 

I feel that the most indelible learning comes from pain and struggle. More politely, this would be called trial and error.  Thankfully it usually happens when we are young and our brains are malleable, but it sometime happens when we're older and less flexible and nimble.  If someone is making an effort it's better to have patience than to share in their frustration.  Even when it means they struggle giving us our $2.08 back (which I'll freely admit would have flummoxed me).

 

I find that I lament a lot of things about society these days that are certainly analogous to the difficulties we see in making change as a cashier.  Grammar, spelling, and punctuation seem to have taken a vacation from the written word.  General civility and acceptance seem to be in short supply.  But I think a lot of this is just perception and things today - with some exceptions in the political realm - aren't all that different than they were decades ago.

 

Steve

[squonk 41,155]

Be happy you go to a store that actually has clerks waiting on you and is staffed. I worked the counter at a Napa for 10 years. Try making change when the customer you're dealing with is dumber than a box of rocks, the phone is ringing off the hook and you have a pile of deliveries that the parts haven't even been pulled yet.

 

If you want to complain about the young kids working not being able to make change, step behind the counter and try the job on for size and see what they have to deal with all day. .

[stevasaurus 22,764]

It is time to stop the Hate and figure out how to help. rather then exoricise.    The kids are alright.

Edited August 14, 2023 by stevasaurus

[JimSraj 430]

Yup, I agree! As the director of the vocational school I taught at once said when a colleague was holding forth about the kids these days, “Kids today aren’t what they used to be !  And they never were. “

[peter lena 8,634]

@stevasaurus   very obvious today , you cannot just say / ask something  of the younger people , you have to fill in the gaps , they really do not have a clue . typical increased gap there is the scarcasm , that goes along with that . if you have the opportunity , explain the situation , without the negativity . watched as my grandkids , picked up jobs , lots of feedback , insight into situations . would often ask them , what the awnswer was ?  get THEIR FEEDBACK TO  A PROBLEM , how would you solve the issue ?  make them think . pete

[stevasaurus 22,764]

Sorry, I thought I had put a smiley face on my post.