Way back in the day, shopkeepers ran tallies of numbers in their heads as they looked over your purchases. In some grocery stores, the cashiers were required to know the prices of all the products. And when it came time to pay, they would count back your change without the aid of their cash register.
In today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, there isn’t time. We have scanners to tell us the prices and feed them directly into the cash register, which is more like a computer than ever before. When we’re done, we hit a button and we’re told how much change to give back. Our task is simply to create that total from the drawer of cash in front of us. We have to think very little. Consequently, many of the cashiers of today don’t know how to count back change. And I’ll admit it—I’m one of them.
I was trained on a register that told you the change you should give, and I became very adept at using that machine, giving proper change, and balancing my till at the end of the night. I flatter myself to think that I was one of the most skilled cashiers where I worked.
But when I moved to a new town and took a job at a fast food restaurant, I found myself thrust into a totally new situation—the registers weren’t as up-to-date, and the change had to be counted back in order to be accurate. My new manager was only a little bit patient as she explained to me how it should be done. If the total came to $4.53, and I was given a ten-dollar bill, I’d start with the pennies and go up to ten. So I’d need seven cents to bring it to sixty, and then forty cents to bring it to a dollar, and then five dollars to bring it up to ten. But try doing that in a fast food environment with people talking all around you and the expectation that you will do it correctly in 2.2 seconds and move on to the next customer … I couldn’t hack it. I crumbled like a day-old burger bun, and ended up taking a different job. Where, incidentally, the register told me how much change to give.
The point is, we can’t always rely on technology to save us, and we can’t let our brains go to rot because we have machines to do our thinking for us. The basic, simple skills of math, money, balancing our checkbooks, staying on budget … these are things we should know how to do, with or without calculators or magic machines to figure it out for us. I am going to make sure my kids know how to count back change, and I’m going to keep working on it until I can do it in a hurry, too. I haven’t worked at a register for over fifteen years, but it’s an excellent skill to have, and I want to be prepared for whatever might come my way in the future.
Related Blogs:
Counting Money and Making Change
Paper Currency – A Human Touch