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Another day of work at the bankrupt retailer, and more interesting developments. Today I came to find out two rather interesting things about our cash registers, as I came upon the store manager talking to one of the department managers when I went to clock in.
This is going to require a bit of digression to explain, so bear with me. First of all, our cash register transactions are processed by scanning items, hitting Total to total them out, then hitting the tender buttons, either twice if the customer has given us exact change, or hit the amount and then hit the tender button once, if he's given us more or less. (i.e., I hit "cash, cash" if he's given me exact change, or "2, 0, 0, 0, cash" if he gives me a $20 bill.)
Second, for the last two years, the managers have been ragging on cashiers about their "rings per minute". Rings per minute is an efficiency rating system that essentially puts the cashiers on a timer and insists that they maintain a certain level of rings per minute productivity. First they wanted us to be at least 10, then at least 12 . . . now, I've been a cashier for over three years, but about the best I could ever manage was between 10 and 12 rings per minute, and it gets me in for a few complaints from management every now and then, but I've always done as much as was humanly possible to ring fast and to "lock" my register when not in use.
And that's the third thing. When we're not ringing up items, we're supposed to halt the timer--either by hitting the key combination to lock the register (so we have to enter a "magic number" to unlock it), or by hitting Total. That way, it doesn't count against us while we're standing out front waiting for another customer, or bagging a particularly hard-to-bag sale item.
Except when I heard the managers talking today, I gathered that someone had made a discovery in regards to this timer halting. Someone at the service desk had finally called another store of our chain that seemed to have all of its rings per minute above 20, and asked them what they were doing different. It came out that instead of just hitting Total, they were hitting Total, then the Credit Card tender key once--because hitting Total by itself only locked the register for 10 seconds, but if you hit a Tender key, it would wait until you either hit it again or hit Clear to cancel it. And it had always been this way--except that none of our managers had known about it until someone got the bright idea to call someone else and ask. (More on that aspect in a bit.)
To me, this only served to counterpoint the ridiculousness of the "rings per minute" efficiency rating system. You see, in general, our cash registers are ridiculously simple to operate. All you really have to know is how to scan, how to push buttons, how to give the amount of change the register tells you to--it's really simple, even a moron could operate one. (And sometimes I feel like some of them are.) As simple as the rest of it is to understand, I seriously doubt that whoever set up the efficiency timer system intended them to be frozen in such an arcane manner as hitting Total then a Tender key once.
Thus, the efficiency rating becomes little more than a matter of exploiting a loophole in the system to rack up inhumanly fast rings per minute ratings. Just by remembering to press one extra button at the right time, any cashier can boost his ratings by a substantial degree without doing anything else different. What, then, does the system really measure?
After this, I was talking to the manager about something else related to the cash registers, and made a second interesting discovery. This will require a bit more digression to explain, so bear with me again.
At our store, whenever we sell an electronic item ranging in price from about $10 up, we have a store-backed extended warranty plan that we try to sell them for an additional $3 to $17 (depending on the price of the item and coverage of the plan). We cashiers get a commission from each of those plans we sell--30 cents, 50 cents, or one dollar, depending on how expensive the plan.
Now, when we had our old cash registers--the ones that predated the flat screen monitor models we've had for a few months now--we had to record each one we sold on a little commission sheet and hand it in. That was how they knew to pay us for them. But since we got these new registers, I was told a while ago that we no longer had to record them. And so I hadn't been--but I had been selling a large number of plans.
I suppose it should have cued me in when none of the commissions I should have been getting showed up on my last couple of paychecks. When I finally asked our personnel manager about this, the other day, she said that as far as she knew, we still needed those commission sheets--so I thought I was pretty much out of luck.
Well, I happened to talk to the store manager today, and he said, no, that wasn't right--the personnel manager should have been given computer printouts by someone else that listed the plans. He said he would be talking to that someone else to get it straightened out.
I happened to talk to the personnel manager later today, as she came through my line with some purchases, and she said that she had simply never been told about this.
So, essentially, I'm working in a store where not all the managers even know all the aspects of how the cash registers work--and, in fact, even our store manager was ignorant of the timer-halting function for over two years.
As some customers are prone to say, "No wonder they're going out of business."
Before going to work today, I had a bit of odd luck. A fellow had emailed me last night saying that he'd seen my resume online, and wondered why I didn't try sending it to various regional headhunters to see if they might be willing to hire me. I didn't even know how to get in contact with such headhunters, other than the ubiquitous "submit your resume to umpteen jillion headhunters for just 2n+1 dollars!" spams that often flood into jobseekers' mailboxes. But this fellow said he'd be happy to send my resume to the area recruiters whose contacts he's made over the years, and would even be happy to concentrate the search in the particular areas where I would like to work (places where I have friends and family).
Well, that's certainly a hope-inducing state of affairs. I'm sort of half hopeful, and half suspicious. After all, the last things I responded to in such hopefullness turned out to be a scam and a part time job at half the proper rate of pay. But on the other hand, the fellow's emails to me were personal responses and not cookie-cutter spams--it seems possible he's just a decent sort of person. It's funny, I hadn't thought there were many of those left in the world.
If I end up getting a job out of this, I'll definitely write him up for Heroic Stories.
This is going to require a bit of digression to explain, so bear with me. First of all, our cash register transactions are processed by scanning items, hitting Total to total them out, then hitting the tender buttons, either twice if the customer has given us exact change, or hit the amount and then hit the tender button once, if he's given us more or less. (i.e., I hit "cash, cash" if he's given me exact change, or "2, 0, 0, 0, cash" if he gives me a $20 bill.)
Second, for the last two years, the managers have been ragging on cashiers about their "rings per minute". Rings per minute is an efficiency rating system that essentially puts the cashiers on a timer and insists that they maintain a certain level of rings per minute productivity. First they wanted us to be at least 10, then at least 12 . . . now, I've been a cashier for over three years, but about the best I could ever manage was between 10 and 12 rings per minute, and it gets me in for a few complaints from management every now and then, but I've always done as much as was humanly possible to ring fast and to "lock" my register when not in use.
And that's the third thing. When we're not ringing up items, we're supposed to halt the timer--either by hitting the key combination to lock the register (so we have to enter a "magic number" to unlock it), or by hitting Total. That way, it doesn't count against us while we're standing out front waiting for another customer, or bagging a particularly hard-to-bag sale item.
Except when I heard the managers talking today, I gathered that someone had made a discovery in regards to this timer halting. Someone at the service desk had finally called another store of our chain that seemed to have all of its rings per minute above 20, and asked them what they were doing different. It came out that instead of just hitting Total, they were hitting Total, then the Credit Card tender key once--because hitting Total by itself only locked the register for 10 seconds, but if you hit a Tender key, it would wait until you either hit it again or hit Clear to cancel it. And it had always been this way--except that none of our managers had known about it until someone got the bright idea to call someone else and ask. (More on that aspect in a bit.)
To me, this only served to counterpoint the ridiculousness of the "rings per minute" efficiency rating system. You see, in general, our cash registers are ridiculously simple to operate. All you really have to know is how to scan, how to push buttons, how to give the amount of change the register tells you to--it's really simple, even a moron could operate one. (And sometimes I feel like some of them are.) As simple as the rest of it is to understand, I seriously doubt that whoever set up the efficiency timer system intended them to be frozen in such an arcane manner as hitting Total then a Tender key once.
Thus, the efficiency rating becomes little more than a matter of exploiting a loophole in the system to rack up inhumanly fast rings per minute ratings. Just by remembering to press one extra button at the right time, any cashier can boost his ratings by a substantial degree without doing anything else different. What, then, does the system really measure?
After this, I was talking to the manager about something else related to the cash registers, and made a second interesting discovery. This will require a bit more digression to explain, so bear with me again.
At our store, whenever we sell an electronic item ranging in price from about $10 up, we have a store-backed extended warranty plan that we try to sell them for an additional $3 to $17 (depending on the price of the item and coverage of the plan). We cashiers get a commission from each of those plans we sell--30 cents, 50 cents, or one dollar, depending on how expensive the plan.
Now, when we had our old cash registers--the ones that predated the flat screen monitor models we've had for a few months now--we had to record each one we sold on a little commission sheet and hand it in. That was how they knew to pay us for them. But since we got these new registers, I was told a while ago that we no longer had to record them. And so I hadn't been--but I had been selling a large number of plans.
I suppose it should have cued me in when none of the commissions I should have been getting showed up on my last couple of paychecks. When I finally asked our personnel manager about this, the other day, she said that as far as she knew, we still needed those commission sheets--so I thought I was pretty much out of luck.
Well, I happened to talk to the store manager today, and he said, no, that wasn't right--the personnel manager should have been given computer printouts by someone else that listed the plans. He said he would be talking to that someone else to get it straightened out.
I happened to talk to the personnel manager later today, as she came through my line with some purchases, and she said that she had simply never been told about this.
So, essentially, I'm working in a store where not all the managers even know all the aspects of how the cash registers work--and, in fact, even our store manager was ignorant of the timer-halting function for over two years.
As some customers are prone to say, "No wonder they're going out of business."
Before going to work today, I had a bit of odd luck. A fellow had emailed me last night saying that he'd seen my resume online, and wondered why I didn't try sending it to various regional headhunters to see if they might be willing to hire me. I didn't even know how to get in contact with such headhunters, other than the ubiquitous "submit your resume to umpteen jillion headhunters for just 2n+1 dollars!" spams that often flood into jobseekers' mailboxes. But this fellow said he'd be happy to send my resume to the area recruiters whose contacts he's made over the years, and would even be happy to concentrate the search in the particular areas where I would like to work (places where I have friends and family).
Well, that's certainly a hope-inducing state of affairs. I'm sort of half hopeful, and half suspicious. After all, the last things I responded to in such hopefullness turned out to be a scam and a part time job at half the proper rate of pay. But on the other hand, the fellow's emails to me were personal responses and not cookie-cutter spams--it seems possible he's just a decent sort of person. It's funny, I hadn't thought there were many of those left in the world.
If I end up getting a job out of this, I'll definitely write him up for Heroic Stories.
