Taking Care of Your Money

Sometimes people pay with bills that have not been well cared for. Sometimes the money has clearly just been balled up in the person’s pockets. I have, more than once, been given a $100 bill that was wadded up not much bigger than a dime.

Now I admit that cashiering has activated a little latent anal-retentiveness in me. When people give me a bundle (even five) of dollar bills, I do wish they were all facing the same way (and my boss requires this of me). I will typically put these disorderly singles in the little basket on the right side of the cash register (away from the window) for later arranging, and take some moments to get the larger bills in their appropriate slots.

But today a guy laid down a little bouquet of rolled up bills and said it was $30. I did take care of myself by saying, “Let’s see what we’ve got here” and then took the time to count it. When people hand me better arranged bills, I will often just eyeball them and not actually count the singles – don’t tell my boss. When I do get around to counting them, lined up the same way, before putting them in the drawer, they are almost always correct. But the chaos of this pile told me I should count it carefully, which I did.

This obviously irritated my young customer. But I realized as he walked back to his car that I really had let him off too easy. I allowed him to get about his business, but I was still faced with that bundle of wadded up bills to be put away, while I had other customers in front of me at the window.

What I really needed to do was to patiently straighten out those bills and put them in the drawer before turning on this guy’s pump. He might then express more irritation – verbally or nonverbally. (It actually occurs to me that this guy really was in a passive-aggressive mode – frustrating him could easily take out the passive part.) I could then have explained, in my most matter-of-fact way, that the money has to go in the drawer before I complete a transaction. I might or might not add, “If you want it to go faster, you need to pay with bills that are in better shape.” (Oh, let’s not. If he’s not catching on at that point, the two-by-four is probably not going to help.)

I feel good about this approach. It’s neither punitive nor arbitrary – it’s simply letting the customer take the consequences of balling up his money.