Paying Cash for Your Stuff

There is nothing worse to deal with in retail than cash.  Its dirty, its wrinkled, it smells, and god forbid you never know where it has been.  What’s worst of all is how different retailers handle it and where they place it in the register.

What irritates me worse than anything are the stores that have the large bills ($50’s and $100’s) laying on the right hand side of the register making them extremely easy to steal by reaching over the register area.  I always believed that these large bills SHOULD be out of site of potential thieves, yet some managers wanted to make it EASY to steal company money.

Back in the days of Woolworth, all the large bills were kept underneath the tray area.  Since the entire tray also contained checks as well as the large bills, fishing for the large bills sometimes took a little time especially i f there were many checks in the drawer.  At least the bills were out of site from potential thieves.  Once a day, two members from the office would go around the store doing cash pickups in the store to eliminate the loads of cash that had accumulated during the day.  This pickup was always around 2:30pm in the afternoon, so that a deposit could be made up and taken to the bank in the mall before 4pm when the mall merchant bank closed.  Sadly, this bank is no longer in the mall, just the ATM outside the door that leads nowhere anymore. Woolworth also did pickups as needed throughout the day as needed and when the pickups didn’t happen on weekends.

Woolworth also handled Canadian money as well and discounted usually around 20% off its face value.  It was always nice to end up with a whole drawer of useless Canadian money at the end of the day with nothing that can be done with it.

Staples, on the other hand, didn’t handle Canadian money and really shouldn’t handle U.S. money either.  When I first started with the company, the front-end manager told us to keep ALL the large bills with the checks.  This meant just zipping them into the check slot and be done with it.  However, as the years went on and the management changed (and not for the better), they were insistent to put large bills under the coin tray.  Being the stubborn bastard that I was, I continued to place the bills in the PROPER location for as long as humanly possible.  In fact, I got written up several times by not following the “policy” that the management wanted me to follow, even to the point of a final warning, which would have led to my termination.    THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WRITTEN POLICY ON WHERE MONEY SHOULD GO—JUST THE DUMBASS DREAMS THAT MANAGERS CREATED TO SATISFY THEIR OWN LAZINESS!!    What really bothered me about putting the money under the coin tray was that sometimes a lot of coins were open and this tray could be VERY HEAVY and easy to dump on the floor.  But this is what they wanted despite being such a hazard!

What is even stupider for this company is that when the drawer had over $500 in it, the register would show a status message at the top of the screen that said “CALL MANAGER – LIMIT REACHED”.  This is great news to anybody walking by the register as it told everybody the drawer was loaded with cash.  It was the RESPONSIBILTY of the managers to remove the cash from the drawer ASAP, but usually it didn’t happen.  In fact, one time the managers waited so long (at least 4 hours) that I had accumulated over $7000 in cash in the drawer.  Certainly, not what anybody should have to deal with.  What made this worse was that I WAS BLAMED for this excessive amount in the drawer!!  Talk about passing the buck!  Management incompetency always run rampart as I will continue to explain in future posts. 

Up Next:  Paying by Check or Useless Piece of Paper