Let’s Start Cashiering!

Virtually all retail jobs start with training as a cashier.  This was the starting point of all three of the companies that I worked for.  However, where I went after I was trained as cashier varied from company to company I worked for.  Most employees hate being a cashier quite possibly for one of a couple reasons:

• You stand in one spot for a long period of time, usually hours at a time.
• It gets monotonous to keep doing the same thing over and over.
• The customers are rude.

The third reason will be discussed in a future post, but the first two are the most important as the shear boredom leads many employees to quit just after a few weeks.  However, the biggest issue is that most employees just can’t figure out how to give back change.  As funny as that sounds, they just don’t get how many nickels, dimes, pennies, or quarters back to a customer.  Add to that the paper currency and it just accumulates to trouble. 

Another intimidation is the register itself.  Too many buttons or too many functions lead the employee to hitting the wrong key more often than they should.  Add to this that employees have to scan merchandise and then bag it and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

For example, I believe that a good cashier can retain concentration while scanning merchandise and maintaining a conversation with the customer at the same time. However, many times the employee gets so wrapped up in a conversation that they don’t pay attention to what they are doing. Such is the point that in the last 10 years I have accumulated over $200 in free or discounted items from stores because of the incompetence of the cashier. Needless to say, that if somebody was overcharged they would demand a refund. However, if they were undercharged, the customer just runs away laughing their head off knowing how stupid the cashier really was! Only once in my 20+ years in retail did a customer ever come back because they were not charged for an item and that was a large printer that was sitting on the floor by the cashier. Of course this happened at Staples and this cashier was promptly fired without ever given another chance. So much forgive and forget!

Another bad thing about cashiering is the training of other cashiers. Normally I was the sucker, I mean employee, who trained most of the new people on the cash register. As part of their training, they had to use my cash drawer to ring up transactions. The bad thing about that is that many of these people were amongst those who can’t count change back to a customer thus creating a shortage in the drawer. And guess who got blamed for problems like that? ME!! Sad to say that managers never researched who was on the register when a problem occurred so it is just as easy to blame everybody and have it go into their permanent record. Ah, you can smell the manager incompetence! I became an easy target for all the register problems since I was one of the very few full-time cashiers. 

On the other hand, I have found cashiers that have personalities of a dead dog.  They act robotic and seem totally disinterested in the customer much less their job.  These people are even worse to deal with than the excessive talkers as they are very unhelpful and add to the fact that many of these companies are failing.  If you get lousy service or deal with lousy employees, the company becomes lousy as well.  As if places like Borders would have learned that and Best Buy should learn that, but then again nobody ever learns from their mistakes in the retail world.

Up Next:  My Next Position – Front End Supervisor or Is That Stupid-Visor!