While ordering ice cream last Monday, I had the embarrassing realization I had counted the wrong amount of change. I rushed to find two quarters in my wallet as I apologized to the cashier.
“That’s OK,” she smiled. “We like change.”
All I could think to say back was “me too.” I was able to pay her so I was only a penny over, and that was a good feeling. Working with money all day does things to you. Paying in exact change was never a concern of mine until I started working on the other side of the register.
After you know the empathy of a cashier, there’s no going back. One of my friends -- who spends her days waiting on customers at K-Mart -- said her mother scolded her for paying in exact change. Something about holding up the line and making people behind her mad.
With her work experience, she’s not worried about the line. Any chance to make someone in her position have a brighter day is taken. There’s more to it than giving the clerk a break, though.
As the daughter of a small business owner, exact change is a blessing in a world where it takes six steps to run a credit charge.
OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but have you ever rang up someone with one of the chip-reader cards? Every time one of our customers hands me one I feel inclined to cross my fingers and say a couple of prayers.
Maybe it’s our small business-minded, thrifty-priced machines, but they have a 60 percent success rate in my experience. Speaking of being small business-minded, it’s usually better for the business to pay in cash, regardless of whether you’re counting exact change.
Our charge machine charges my mother’s business a certain fee for each charge it processes. Faster is not always better as it turns out.
One of our frequent customers asked on her second trip of the week what was best for us. My mother told her cash or check and she had the grace to follow through with that answer. I haven’t seen her charge anything unless she’s using a check since she inquired about it.
Perhaps you’ve made a few purchases at local businesses without thinking twice about charging them. Maybe you’re guilty of insufficient tipping, which is another sin altogether; I just hope you consider the worker next time you’re doing any kind of business.
It might be worth it to dig in your purse or pocket for that 35 cents or become your grandfather at the grocery store and write out a check. Sure, the customer is always right. But that doesn’t make him infallible.
Customers that recognize this see the person serving them as a person, and that’s something that tends to be forgotten when we’re used to instant gratification. So the next time you’re stuck in a long line, it might just be because I couldn’t find the right number of quarters as quickly as you’d like.
