Who’s Drawer is It Anyway?

Handling money shouldn’t be brain surgery.  You enter the amount the customer gives you and you read the amount of change to give the customer back.  Sound simple, right?  Why is such a major issue in all retailers.

Back in the days of Woolworth, every register was a community drawer.  This means that if you have a code to run a register then you can run any register in the store.  At the start of an employee using a register, they would input their employee number into the register and sign the sheet that hung on the side of the register.  Along with their signature were spaces for time on and time off the register.  The time function could be accessed with the press of the time key on the register.  Occasionally, an employee would forget either to sign the slip or forget to put their employee number in the register.  However, this was rate to happen, but it did happen.  At the end of a busy day, it would not be uncommon to have at least 3 sheets stapled together with names of those who signed into the register.  Each sheet held 10 names which meant at least 30 different register changes during the day.  When the registers were upgraded, the sign in sheet disappeared and the employee only needed to input their employee number at the start of using the register. 

In the old days, if there was a problem with the register, either an overage or shortage, it was not uncommon to unroll the journal tape and examine each transaction to find where the error occurred.  Most times the error was found, but occasionally it wasn’t.  The newer registers unfortunately didn’t change this at all.  When the guilty party was found (if found), the employee was confronted with the error transaction and was written up accordingly.  Since I always kept care of transactions, I never got written up during my time at Woolworth.

On the other hand, HQ treated every register like a sacred shrine.  When a cashier came in for the day, they would go to the cash office.  Normally, the employee would press a buzzer and be let into the office.  If nobody was around, a manager would have to be paged.  The cash office person *(or manager) would give the cashier a drawer with $100 in it.  It was the responsibility of the cashier to count this money and make sure it was all there.  If there was a shortage or overage at the start, it was noted on the money count sheet that was with the bag that the cash came out of.  After counting the drawer, the employee was escorted to wherever they was supposed to go with that particular drawer.  Nobody else could ring on a register with somebody else’s money drawer.  This was policy, no exceptions.  When the employee took a break, went to lunch, or did anything else, the drawer would be placed in the office with a locked cover over it until the employee returned.  At the end of the day, the employee was escorted to the cash office where the employee would count their money.  When the employee was finished counting, they paged a manager to check the drawer.  My drawer was always excellent, not off by more than a penny either plus or minus.  Other employees sometimes were not so lucky.  One day in the cash office, there were about 7 of us in there, mostly girls except 2 guys and it was VERY HOT in there in more ways than one.  No wonder shorts were preferred clothing choice.

When I started working at Staples, they did pretty much the same procedure as HQ did.  This lasted for about a year or so until the company decided to simplify their cash handling procedure.  The simplification basically made all registers community registers.  This meant that anybody could run them as long as they were programmed into the main computer as a cashier-enabled.  Of course, this created the scenario of the “I am not responsible” for each drawer.  Of course this meant that if there was a problem with a register usually the office person had to find the error.  However, one of the office managers, Karen, NEVER spent the time to research the problems and found it much simpler to pass the blame on ALL USERS of that particular register, even if they had just one transaction.  Karen’s excuse was that she was “just too busy to do her job properly”.  So instead of doing her job, she would rather have people like me, who hardly ever has a problem with their register to suddenly get a LOT of sheets to sign basically admitting to the error even though it was NEVER my fault.  What was bad about these sheets is that they were put in my PERMANENT RECORD and never removed!  I remember 1 day that she had me sign about 10 of these sheets (she had about 40 of them altogether).  When I questioned her about them, she just said to me “Just sign the F* papers!, it WON’T EVER MATTER!”.  Certainly, I should have gone along with my instincts and never sign any of them especially knowing that they were NOT my problems to begin with.   What is worse about that is that 10 years later, these same sheets were used against me in my case against Staples as part of their proof that I was a bad employee!  Talk about altering the truth to satisfy your side of the story!  Sadly, NOBODY believed me that these were not truly mine alone and I was being convicted because of somebody else’s laziness 10 years earlier.  I was always reluctant to sign these sheets and for good reason.  Unfortunately, it took 10 years and the loss of my job to find out that good reason.  Just part of the fraudulent information used against me and more proof of how low blow Staples REALLY is!

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