The lack of math skills in the world is paying dividends for some as it seems nearly most retail workers have no clue what they are doing, even with the aid of technology, they still can’t get if right.
Yesterday, I took a break from baseball related activities and went to get gas and later eat with a friend.
At the gas station, I went inside to pay for gas. The guy in front of me was trying to buy a can of snuff. The UPC was not on file so the cashier had no clue how much to charge. So she called the manager at home. She was then instructed to scan a can of another flavor. Well it was not on file either. The cashier was totally perplexed and didn’t know what to do.
She scanned the cost of the entire roll and it was on file so she offered to sell the entire roll to the guy.
I’m not sure what the outcome was as the other cashier finally diverted her attention away from the confusion and took care of my needs. I worked in the UPC office of a grocery store and at Walmart.
Back in the day if this would have occurred, the cashier would have manually keyed in a price and hit tobacco and made a note for the UPC workers and then item would be put on file. To simple for today’s world.
After leaving the gas station and friend and I went out to eat which lead to another
encounter with a clueless soul.
At the conclusion of the meal, my bill was $14 and change and my friend’s bill was $9 and change. The waitress brings out a mobile card reader. I chose to pay with cash. So I handed her a $20 bill expecting $5 and change back.
Meanwhile the waitress struggles with the mobile POS (Point of Sale) not piece of you know what, which in this case it might as well have been a POS.
She finally tells my friend, ‘Here you go, all you have to do is tap your card. So my friend taps her card and chooses a tip, while the waitress is walking back to the register to get my change. The POS then shows that my friend has been charged $18 for her $9 meal.
The waitress returns and hands me $10 in change, so I have paid $9 for my $14 meal. It doesn’t take a genius to see what has happened here.
The waitress then looks at my friend and says, “Well you have paid for the wrong meal. Do you want a refund?”
She is like um yes, I don’t want to pay for something I didn’t have.
So the waitress is like “um okay let me talk to my boss.” So she disappears up front for a while.
It never occurred to her that I too have paid for the wrong meal, however the error is in my favor.
Yes I could have gave my friend the difference and we could have got even on our own, but we knew this would be entertaining to see if the obvious mistake could be figured out.
Plus my friend was concerned about $18 coming out of her account and running her short on other bills.
Soon the waitress returns and tells my friend, ‘So we took some of the cost off and now your meal is $8 instead of $9 so you saved a $1. So you can tap your card again and the $18 charge will not hit your bank, it will just say pending and you will pay $9.’
So tap goes the card and poof now we both have paid for $9 meals and no one has paid for the $14 meal.
I asked the waitress if this mobile POS was something new since another friend and I went to this place over a week ago and that transaction was old fashioned, with a waitress bringing a receipt and checking us out at the register.
She said no, it’s the waitress’ choice and that she prefers the mobile POS because it is quicker!
That statement cracked me up, because out incorrect transactions were not quick, they were rather time consuming for all.
So we get outside and look at the receipts, they had no clue what they were doing.
They credited the bill some sort of sale price to knock the $14 meal down to $8 and apparently never caught that I too paid for the $9 meal.
In the old days you could have canceled the order, refunded the money and redone everything.
But hey, technology is quicker or as one cashier once told me, “I’m from the technology age, we don’t need to use our brains to make change.”
Apparently, they may need the brains to make change but they still need the brains to run the machines that makes the change.
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