sadly, a person making minimum wage in america would be baffled by seeing a bill larger than a $5 or $1. a good cartoon.
written by someone that’s never been to or worked in retail
“you deserve poverty for giving me poor customer service”
I hope the person who made that cartoon dies a painful death.
and furthermore I’ll work circles around you, dickhead.
oh ps. what kind of name is Rob Smith Jr?????
“*this is a true story”
somehow i highly doubt it.
As someone who has done a lot in retail; this is literally impossible. The damn cash register tells you what change to give. The artist definitely pulled this one out of their ass
Ass, brain, whats the difference?
The best part that undermines the cartoonist’s intent is that, if she’s demanding $11/hour and the meal is $10.60, it means right now she can’t even afford to eat where she works with an hour’s pay.
I don’t think people realize how mathematically-minded a lot of people in poverty are. I mean, advanced mathematics are a difficult subject for a lot of people, but I’ve seen some people working for 7.25 an hour manage to add large sums up in their head and come out correct. A person making minimum wage knows the exact amount of money they are making per shift and can factor in what is being taken out in taxes. In particularly mind-numbing jobs, a lot of them try to calculate just how much they’re making per minute to do a repetitive and boring task. A person making minimum wage thinks: if at the end of my shift my average sum will be $46, then that will pay off the electric bill for the month, and tomorrow’s wages will pay off the water bill, and the next two week’s wages will go to rent.
Minimum wage workers mentally balance their checkbooks because every cent counts.
So if the purpose of this comic was to make some commentary about how people who are poor deserve to be poor because they are uneducated, then it was poorly executed. If it is, as it says in the corner, based on a true story, then I’m betting that the cashier was unused to giving exact change and was taken by surprise. It may also have been her first day on the register. Or her register could have had an error, because certain registers lock up if something goes wrong.
Basically, this comic is an unreliable account.
I was never taught how to do this.
My parents didn’t want me walking around with cash on me at school, so I had a debit card with a really low limit on it to buy lunch when I needed to in high school. I never learned the “pay extra to get round change” thing until I had worked at a cash. I cannot lie; it never bothered me if the person told me they were doing it and I could enter that into the till and have the register tell me “give this much back”, but when they would tack it on after everything was punched in, it took me a while to be able to do it properly without panicking. Sometimes I had to get someone else to make sure I was giving them the right change (I’m terrible at mental math, and would blame myself to buy some time “Oh, I just don’t want to accidentally miscalculate and short-change you! Just a sec! Silly me!”)And for those of you watching this scene go down from the outside and judging the cashier; I’m going to assume you’ve never been a cashier, or that you’ve been very lucky as a chaser and were never conned by a short-chang artist.
See, it might just look like the cashier is panicking and calling for the manager because “Hurr-durr what is math?! Do you want fries with that?”… but I promise you that there are some slick mother fuckers out there who do this to cashiers specifically to steal from them, and we know it. So, we call for backup. These short-changers wait until the register has calculated everything and at the last minute say “Oh, here’s $20.60!” and as you work out the difference (because now you’ve got a handful of odd change based on what they’d given you before, and the new “rounded” change isn’t always as obvious as $10, sometimes it is just to cut out three pennies), they’ll start rushing you through calculations. Then they’ll say “never mind, I’ll give you this instead!” and now you’ve got money in your hands, on the counter, in the till, all while they’re telling you new numbers and also asking if you can break their other $20… and it keeps going until they manage to trick you into handing them $10 extra while the people behind them are giving you the stink eye for not knowing how to give change.
In the end, that $10 comes out of your pay in a lot of places (even though large companies are insured for obscene amounts of money going ‘missing’ like that, but whatever). And $10 might not seem like much, but these con-artists don’t just hit up convenience stores and McDonalds. They also go to electronics stores (where people aren’t used to dealing in cash to begin with because everything is $50 minimum), or high end clothing and department stores where they can sneak $60-$150, at least, out of a cashier without anyone knowing until the end of the day.
So if you see something like this, or if it is happening to you, remember that these cashiers are working minimum wage, working 10 or 11 hour shifts with little or no breaks, with customers and corporations breathing down their necks. They might be a bit slow sometimes because they’re new, because they’re tired, or maybe even because they aren’t that intelligent. They might be trying to stop a con artist from stealing from them. They might be trying to make sure they’re not accidentally short-changing you! But who cares; slow your roll.
When I worked at Home Depot, I had countless customers using the above method to cheat my register out of money. I saw countless people fall for the trick and end up fired for someone’s greed. It’s absolutely infuriating. And then we have dumbasses like OP telling us “well you deserve poverty because you obvs can’t count”. And even if someone is bad at math, that doesn’t mean they deserve to live in poverty. People who have trouble with English don’t deserve to live in poverty. People who struggle with things /you/ determine to be essential because /you’re/ good at them don’t make them deserving of poverty. Physicists aren’t going about saying anyone who can’t grasp basic physics deserves to make next to nothing and have no access to things like health care, and I’m pretty sure their jobs are more important than OP’s. Get off your high horse, you might break something.
I was short one day because of this. Luckily I get forgiven for stuff like that at my job since the managers get it.
I have dyscalculia, and am terrified of working the register because of it. I know I’m vulnerable to con artists and just plain dishonest or opportunistic people. Pretty sure I don’t deserve to be looked down on because of a condition I was born with. Also, mathematics are not the only form of intelligence, and should not be used as a measuring stick for it.