Making change

[dougo]

Today I bought a sandwich for $6.25. In my wallet was a $20 bill and five singles, so I gave the cashier $22. She looked at me like I was crazy, and tried to give me back the two singles. I convinced her to take them, so she gave me back a $10 bill and 75 cents. Eventually I convinced her to give me back a $5 bill also.

Am I crazy to want to lighten my wallet when possible? Am I making cashiers' lives harder by not just giving the single smallest bill that's more than the charge?

I'd rather they just subtract credits from the chip in my arm, but the deli isn't equipped to do that yet.

Comments

[marm0t.livejournal.com]

In college they totally subtracted credits from the chip in my arm in the cafeteria for the student meal plan.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

I did a lot of this on the trip, but not always. I noticed myself applying some quick heuristics in which I estimated the intelligence of the cashier, the intelligence of the cash register, and the dependence of the former on the latter to do math. Some people are smart enough to understand what you're trying to do; other people aren't, but they just punch in the numbers and give you the amount of change the machine tells them to. It's the ones in the middle you've got to watch out for.

[tombking.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder what the basic life skills of the employees of fast food chains are.
You are not crazy.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Here is my theory about what happens in that brain.

In your position they would just hand over the $20 because it's simplest.

When you do otherwise, they suspect that you're trying to pull a fast one. This is probably why it took so long to get the other $5: she was convinced you were pulling some sort of fast-talker scam.

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

You bought a sandwich for $6.25?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Technically it was a wrap. And it had a generous helping of sliced Boar's Head roast turkey.

Why, how much are good deli sandwiches where you live?

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

The glib answer is, there are no good deli sandwiches where I live!

The real answer is, I don't eat those very often, so I don't really know. But if I was paying $6.25 I'd expect it to be a real good sandwich. Sounds like it was.

[perci.livejournal.com]

I think they think you misheard or miscounted, since most people (and I submit that the people who read your LJ are not in the category "most people") would be thinking "pay" rather than "apply math + logic to pay in some way that lightens wallet even more than buying a $6 sandwich already does."

$22 for $6.25 is not obvious--it really does look like an error. My first thought would have been that you'd meant to give me $7 and had mistaken the $20 bill for a $5 bill. (My second thought might have been that you'd seen too many movies about small-time grifters, but that's because I've seen too many etc.) Anyhow, it's not like when when the sandwich is $5.39 and you hand over $10.39--which never throws a cashier. In fact, I bet that had you handed over $11.25 or $21.25, she'd have seen the point immediately, possibly without explanation.

Once you explain, I doubt you're making their lives harder, since increasing the amount of change in a cash register is usually good.

At any rate, I can't really join y'all in making correlations between a cashier's intelligence and their confusion over an odd transaction or tendency to draw the conclusion most obvious based on their experience.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I wasn't actually saying anything about her intelligence; I regularly get tangled up in arithmetic simply trying to calculate the tip, and that's not at the end of a lunch rush. Also I'm not very good at making sandwiches, let alone wrapping them up so they won't leak.

Anyway, my questions weren't actually rhetorical: I really was trying to figure out whether what I was doing was strange and/or pointless. And I think I've decided that carrying a $5 bill instead of five singles is a pretty trivial thing to care about, and not worth the potential social friction caused by cleverly trying to arrange it.

[perci.livejournal.com]

Actually I was referring to some of your respondents' remarks about intelligence, not yours.

I'm thinking the only real social friction you create when you do this is probably making your transaction take an extra 15 seconds, which around these parts seems to be enough time to piss off the people behind you in line, which is their problem; they'd also be pissed if you used the 15 seconds by asking for mustard or something.

[perci.livejournal.com]

I saw a guy trying to lighten his wallet at Urban Pain this afternoon. The cashier was very confused at first; then when she got what the guy was doing, she seemed determined to come up with a better configuration than his. I was amused.

[fin9901.livejournal.com]

I end up in situations like this when some item is $x.81 and I hand over some paper, a nickel and a penny-- since I'd rather get back a quarter than a dime, nickel and 4 pennies.