The Company’s Money is Safe with Me?

During my last 2 years of working at Woolworth, I also started working in the cash office.  I did this mostly on weekends and during the week when someone was on vacation.

This job was performed in the morning, before the store opened. Given about 2 hours before the store (and the mall opened), I had to get anywhere between 15 and 25 cash bags balanced and get new bags ready for the next day.  This was a very stressful job mostly because it was usually a race against the clock to be done before opening time.  The reason I had to get done before open time is that I usually was assigned to the customer service desk at store opening time. 

If I was lucky, I usually had about 10 to 15 minutes before store opening to use the bathroom and take a drink before positions, but most times I was running back and forth finishing up the cash office while running the service desk.  Of course, it was a virtually impossible task which was required of me.

Besides doing the cash office on weekends, part of the job on weekends required me to go around to every register in the store around 2pm and do a cash pickup from all the registers.  I would then take all the money back to the cash office, count it, and then do an afternoon deposit to the bank in the mall.  Usually I left the deposit bag in the safe until the following Monday as it was difficult to get to the bank on weekends.  It was not uncommon on Monday to have as many as 4 or 5 deposit bags from the weekend especially if a Monday was a holiday. 

I did this position until my very last day with the company.  On the day following my last day, the company was going to do a completely different approach of counting bags which basically threw all the money together rather than counting each bag separately.  I was so glad that my last day came when it did.

I find it interesting that Staples never trained me for the position of cash office during my 12+ years with them.  After all, I had put on my application that I had previous cash office experience as I also had put that I had previous front-end supervisor experience.  It makes me wonder if Staples really cared about me as an employee or just wanted to abuse me as a customer service person.  I guess they really hated me from day one…but then again no surprise there.

Of course, I held other positions at Woolworth as well, which is the subject of my next blog post.

Staples, unfortunately, was a one-position job…not a bit of variety in nearly 13 years..

Up Next:  The Other Woolworth Positions