Comments | kevin_standlee: Kids These Days

kevin_standlee

Kids These Days

Feb 11, 2016 15:55

This afternoon after lunch, I took a bottle of propane over to Hanneman Service to be refilled, and while they did that, I walked across the street to get the mail and to go into Family Dollar where I needed to pick up a small item. The item cost, after tax, $6.16. I did not have exact change, but I wanted to minimize the amount of change I got ( Read more... )

money, stores, fernley

Comments 13

kalimac February 12 2016, 00:00:49 UTC

I've had similar experiences, but more than that is my experience in Britain where they don't understand this kind of strategic overpaying to minimize change at all. Even to keep it simple, if something cost £6 and I gave a £10 note and a £1 coin so that I could get a £5 note back, I'd get a "stupid American, doesn't understand our money" look.

nojay February 12 2016, 01:51:39 UTC

In the UK these days shop tills are almost all set up to calculate the change and it's a job requirement for the cashier to use them for that purpose. The process logs all the money in to the till and back out again and it doesn't rely on the cashier doing maths in their heads and making mistakes when tendering change. They might get it right ninety-nine times and wrong once but that mistake could cost them their job and piss off a customer.

The procedure is the items are swiped or weighed and a total generated. I proffer money -- I often try to minimise the change I get back with some mental arithmetic of my own and a quick study of the notes and coins I have with me. That amount is punched in to the till and the change to be returned to me is displayed. The cashier counts that out and hands it to me. The fact I gave then £5.13 to pay for £3.63 of groceries is dealt with by the till display telling them to give me £1.50 (two coins) in change, no mental arithmetic on their part required.

kevin_standlee February 12 2016, 02:26:37 UTC

Yes. This is exactly what I did. If he'd typed the numbers into the till, it would have told him $5.10 (what I wanted). But he wouldn't take my money that way because he didn't realize what I was doing. In essence, he was doing more work than he needed to do - and doing it wrong.

kalimac February 12 2016, 13:48:07 UTC

US shop tills do this now too, but even when they didn't, the tellers not only knew how to make change, but also what strategic overpaying meant. The ones in the UK looked at me as if I was stupid for trying.

Thread 7

raycun February 12 2016, 15:00:40 UTC

in his defence, he probably he has a couple of hundred customers a day giving him money, and most days none of them are thinking about how to minimise the number of coins they get in their change. It isn't that he couldn't do the maths, but he didn't realise what you were trying to do. You put more thought into the transaction than he did.

kevin_standlee February 12 2016, 15:35:25 UTC

Oh, I understand that. My point is that he was actually thinking too hard. He should have just typed the numbers into the machine and given his stupid customer what the machine told him to do.

topum February 12 2016, 22:50:05 UTC

I don't understand why he did not just punch the numbers into the machine.
I am an obsessive change minimiser.

ext_2943885 February 13 2016, 10:02:01 UTC

I'm a Brit who regularly uses this technique. I've never yet got surprise or an odd response.

msconduct February 13 2016, 12:11:17 UTC

In NZ we have a very high rate of EFTPOS use and no longer have a coin smaller than 10 cents, so I suspect that the kind of transaction you're talking about would utterly confuse 99% of our retail people as a result. I'm pretty nifty on the change side, having had a job at 14 selling food in the school tuckshop which required figuring change in my head at extremely high speed, but nevertheless I always end up with oodles of loose change in the US because the sales tax thing means every amount comes a surprise (I'm never sure exactly how much it is in whichever state I'm in.). Rather than digging around in my wallet for the correct change and holding others up I'm likely to proffer bills (and get yet more change). I often wonder if Americans all know how much an item is going to be with tax included or whether they don't know until it's rung up either. I'm not sure why prices are displayed without tax in the first place - it makes everything look cheaper, but it's so inconvenient for the customer. The US being the land of customer ( ... )

kevin_standlee February 13 2016, 17:00:39 UTC

I doubt anyone knows what the final price of anything is going to be unless they are buying in one of the states (like Oregon) that has no sales tax. While most sales tax laws allow retailers to post tax-included prices, it's pretty rare for them to do so. (Complicating matters are local taxes; sales tax is higher in Reno than in Fernley because there's an extra tax there.)

I also think we should get rid of the penny and round to the nearest five cents, but people always claim that it will lead to price gouging as retailers will round everything up. To that I say, "Who cares? Pennies are pointless, and they cost more to mint than their own face value." In fact, my wife picks up pennies on the street not for the money, but because if you drill a hole in the middle of them you get a nice zinc washer for less than the cost of buying one from a store.