These past two years food has taken a back seat to other priorities. Last year I went nearly 200 days without ever cooking a meal. Add it up and that’s a lot of 7-11 sandwiches, cheese pizza, and pad thai. All these trips to the convenience store have allowed me to observe cash register etiquette first-hand, and I’ve concluded that it’s flawed.
Last week I was buying lunch at the commissary. I ordered a large thanksgiving styled turkey dinner from the fake Koo Koo Roo and then stood in line. It was peak lunch hours so the line was pretty long. When I got to the cashier the total came to seven dollars and some change. I gave the cashier a twenty, and she returned the bills and change in the same hand. This made for a peculiar moment. I had to scramble to do four things at once. I needed to put the change in my pocket, my bills in the wallet, my wallet in my back packet, and then pick up the tray. Meanwhile there was a line of impatient students eyeing me down for holding things up. I looked to the cashier, but she had no sympathy for my plight, she had already invited up the next person in line.
One of the most awkward experiences waiting in line at a cashier is having the change returned back to you in the same hand that the bills are in. Its pretty selfish if you think about it, because the cashier is making her life easier at your expense. It causes the customer to be directly responsible for the delay of the line. For me, the guilt of holding up the line often leads to frantic rushes where I either drop the coin, or end up throwing it in my wallet. This inevitably warps the wallet, and has the added bonus of falling out at some later date.
After some research, my crackpot team and I have come up with several solutions. First, one might apply a buffer zone. Similar to how the next person in line keeps his distance at an atm machine, one should keep his distance at the cash register. The idea here is to alleviate the guilt associated with holding up the line by adjusting the physical proximity of those behind you. However, there might be some difficulty having the line abide by these new rules. A second option is having the cashier simply hand the change back with enough time for the customer to place it appropriately. One problem with this is that the cashier might become irritable waiting, in which case you have simply traded one form of guilt for another. To solve this inconvenience, you can have the cashier give you the bills before she calculates the proper change amount. Thus, while she is grabbing the change owed, you will have already put the bill back in to your wallet.
I suggest a one-day training session for all cashiers followed by a week of on-site behavioral modification.
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