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Comment by pentel-0_5 | Hacker News Reader

Reprogramming of cash registers.

Canadian here: we don't reprogram cash registers. They tell the exact amount and then we're charged either the exact amount (via card) or a rounded-off amount (if paying cash).

FWIW, 86% of "total payment volume" in Canada was digital, and 53% of transactions were contactless. If that's not the case in the US, it may be more of an adjustment.

Yea american POS systems will have to get the rounding off added because ultimately cashiers will get grilled if their registers are off at the end of day.

Registers are always off at the end of the day everywhere I've worked retail.

I even worked as a bank teller and it wasn't uncommon for drawers to be out small amounts.

From what I recall when I worked retail, nobody cared until the difference was something like 2% or so. Then someone might care, or might not.

It was always easy to keep a perfect running balance when the cashier can make change accurately and when there was a penny/nickel jar because customers might not have had exact change. It's only the normalization of sloppiness, or sometimes theft, of cashiers that causes shrinkage in reconciliation. It doesn't just magically happen and isn't a foregone conclusion.

It doesn't just magically happen, but it basically is a foregone conclusion. Nobody cares about a register that is off by 57 cents at the end of the day. You're going to waste WAY more money trying to hire "smart" cashiers at $5-$10 over the prevailing wage than you would just putting up with people who occasionally make errors in counting change.

Last time I worked retail was 1996-1997 and we meticulously had to count the register. If it was off then it was on us. This was pre touch screens and auto calculating registers. The same still applies in the latest modern world. You are off then you pay.

Sloppy managers and lax fiscal controls aren't pertinent to companies that actually do check.

The companies check, they just realize that humans are human. There are procedures for ensuring that cash handling errors are never made, but they are so wildly expensive and time consuming compared to the option of not hunting down a $.73 discrepancy that it isn't worth it. The procedures typically involve multiple employees counting (this is how the discrepancies are found at the end of the day), or counting all cash in triplicate (this is what bank tellers are doing when they give you the money, they are counting it out for their sake). It is a trade-off that competent management makes, you don't hire two cashiers for every register, and ask them to count everything in triplicate for the sake of a few pennies.

This isn't going to conform to your worldview, but even ATMs and automatic bill accepters make errors. There is a procedure for cash discrepancies even when you take the human out of the loop.

Doubtful. It's required to keep a running balance of net cash contained so that it can be manually counted and reconciled for creating that day's bank deposit. Percentage of money type is meaningless to this fact.

Not at all, some POS systems will account for rounding, but most don't. One only needs to look at your receipt to see if this is the case. Cash registers are nearly always out a dollar or two at the end of the day anyway, that's normal, and cash rounding doesn't change that much.

Also, in Canada, I have never seen those automatic change-making machines that are common in US convenience stores. Cashiers always count and handle cash by hand.

> Cash registers are nearly always out a dollar or two at the end of the day anyway, that's normal, and cash rounding doesn't change that much.

This is human error, not a software design error.

The point is that it doesn't matter, it all evens out in the end.

I'm not sure what you mean by that platitude.

The mental and physical cost of worrying about a few cents isn't worth it.

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