Shops deliberately short changing

[ThisLittleKitty]

Anyone else feel like shops try to do this on purpose sometimes? It's happened way too frequently for my liking. Just now I was in the shop I bought 3 drinks and a packet of crisps. I handed the woman £10 and she gave me back a couple of pound coins. I told her I gave her £10 she said are you sure, this went on for a few minutes, eventually I tell her to check the cameras which she does and there it is £10. Aibu in thinking sometimes they do it on purpose hoping you don't notice?!

Where I work we are allowed £1 either way; so we can get up to £1 over or up to £1 down. Anything outside of that and we get written up, though we don’t have to pay it back regardless of amount. Too many write ups can lead to disciplinary action.

It rarely happens though; tills can easily waver a few pence either way but not often any more than that. We have strict policies about not using any till other than our own to avoid discrepancies.

No well known shop or restaurant will ever try and cheat you out of money, simply because there’s cameras everywhere and too many discrepancies can lead to disciplinary action. Even too many voids are investigated.

Corner shops of course don’t have the same policies or even reputation to maintain, so while it’s possible, I’d still say it was unlikely.

Customers attempting to scam shops out of money, however, happens all the time.

There are bad apples everywhere. Shopkeepers included.

There is a petrol station near me that does this regularly. They give you change from a ten when you've given them £20. They give you £8 if the change should be £9.
They open 24 hours and it is fair to say that a lot of their customers can be a little bit bladdered in the evenings and don't notice.
But if they rob every other customer that way, they will be making a nice little bonus at the end of the day.
And it isn't just one staff member either. They all seem to be doing it.
A large supermarket like Asda or Tesco will check that till staff don't carry their own money on the till so they will have less scope for nicking stuff. But small cash driven businesses can get away with it if staff are not honest.

Ladyofthecanyon - does your till work out the change? If it works out the change there would be no discrepancy because it would assume you had given the change it had told you to give. The £1 paid for the item is still there, it has told you to give £99 in change but you have only given £9 because I paid with a £10 note, there would be no discrepancy because it would expect the other £90 to have been given to the customer in change. The type of till makes no difference as long as the actual change given is the correct amount.

I’ll explian another way.
There is no money in the till, I buy a thing for £1, using a £10 note, till says give £9 change the till now has £1 which is what the item cost( ignore that you can’t give change with no money!)

Now there is no money & I buy a thing for £1, pay with £10 but you type in I paid with £100, the till tells you give £99 change. Because I haven’t paid with £100 you give £9. Till thinks you have given me £99. The till still has £1 which is what the item cost, therefor the till balances even though you typed in the wrong amount.

I nearly always say the amount owing, the amount given in cash and the amount due back in change. I think it looks more transparent to customers and it helps me stop mistakes. No one is perfect though!

Also, IME cashing up, my tills have usually been under if they're out. Could be operator error as to what gets entered
on the system at sale but it's usually pennies/a couple of quid - someone has probably over changed a customer. Either up or under will result in notifications on the system and you take different action depending on how much by. It annoys me when people don't want their 1 or 2p or small change as everywhere I've worked, this will be clocked on the system and if there's another error, it could result in a big enough discrepancy to start an investigation. If I could ban cash in shops I would; it's the most bothersome part of the job, especially sleight of handers. They waste a lot of time.

As an aside @StickyToffeeVodka do you work at a sports fashion retailer or another fascia owned by them? That system sounds familiar to me and brings back memories of their terrifying stasi wannabeloss control department!

Nancy75

No, our till doesn't work out the change. So your system is correct ( for your till) and mine is correct for mine.

We have tried teaching people to use sub totals but it was such a clusterfuck that we gave up. Thankfully most people pay by card.

So if your till doesn’t work out change you must always key in the amount of the item & never key in the amount handed over? Otherwise your till will always be wrong?

Why would they steal from till when there are obviously working cameras on it?

Many people can't do simple math and most cashiers here don't seem to care if you buy something or not or drop dead in front of them as long as you don't bother them from checking their phone and having personal conversations with other employees.

YANBU OP
This happens far too often in our local shop - at least half the times I went there, and the mistakes never seemed to favour the shopper. I avoid it now, don't need the hassle. It's a busy place so £1 or two for every other transaction soon adds up.

I've pulled a till in the middle of a shift to count it due to accusations being made. We know how much should be in there and if a customer said we owed them ten quid (for example) we could quickly find out.

It annoys me when people don't want their 1 or 2p or small change as everywhere I've worked, this will be clocked on the system and if there's another error, it could result in a big enough discrepancy to start an investigation

I work in a supermarket, mostly on the cigarette/lottery kiosk, and this happens all the time as cigarettes are usually priced at odd values - £8.89/£7.42 etc - and people were forever rounding up to the next coin value -£8.90 or £9/£7.50 etc - and telling us to keep the change. We used to try to keep a money bag of "kept change" in the drawer so it could be accounted for during the end of day till counts but because the kiosk tills were triggering discrepancies on a daily basis it was causing too much of an issue.

Our management eventually gave in and placed charity collection tins at every one of the kiosk tills so that if a customer tells us to keep it we can just say "Thanks, I'll pop it in the charity box" and put the change straight in the tin. Since this happened the discrepancies have dwindled to practically zero and the only times something is flagged is usually when a customer has claimed they were given the wrong change and the cash office has been informed that the till may be £X up and if so then Mrs Smith is owed £X and can we call her to let her collect the money.

We have RMHC boxes by the till for that exact reason.

Of course there's a chance that the person working the till pockets the difference. It's a common method of theft.

When I worked as a night club manager an over till was definitely a sign of something going on with the staff. They lost track of their overcharging or the amount the took from the customer not matching what the till said. 'Random' till checks throughout the night would often show discrepancies where we suspected the user of the till. If they were adding £2.50 to a bill and waiting to do it 8 times before pocketing £20 then it would show up.

I used to take great pleasure in having the police come and arrest people who had been stealing mid-shift.

Of course, I didn't declare overs to head office. They stayed in petty cash for when we had unders. It was a key metric of my bonus and I'd sometimes balance the tills from my own pocket.

That was several years ago - I'd imagine that there aren't as many issues in that area with touchless payment systems.

I've only ever worked in one place with a charity tin. It never had anything in it! Most recent job is very cash heavy and has a higher diff margin so less of a problem although I still prefer people to take their change as it keeps numbers more accurate. I was also taught that no till is perfect 100% of the time; if it is then it's probably been fixed and it's as big a red flag as constant (high value) discrepancies.

In my first job, it would depend on the value of a positive discrepancy. If it was unexplained and unexpected, over by up to approx £1 and we could take it out in good change, we'd usually recount, declare a miscount by operator if still up and stick it in the secret change jar to balance subsequent small shorts as long as we could cover the exact amount. We still got and declared +- tills, but this sorted out really petty errors and kept our (thankfully low anyway) error rate down. We just hid the secret change jar from Audit. The other retail trick is to declare a missing small amount on the system as an error on takings. If you cashed up bang on the day before but your floats are down £1 or 40p or something trivial next start of trade, declare your float as perfect, recheck for missed change in the safe as count mistakes happen and, if it's really missing, it becomes a -40p on that day and still gets recorded. Usually it's a handling error and the money will be put in to the corresponding till or left in the office to be added on to a cash up. It's the easiest way to deal with a small discrepancy if you suspect a previous count or float mistake (or someone's dropped coins). Obviously any larger difference, frequent amount or pattern would immediately be reported.
Having also been both over and under changed on change orders from the bank though, honestly, cash handling mistakes happen.

Of course, I didn't declare overs to head office. They stayed in petty cash for when we had unders. It was a key metric of my bonus and I'd sometimes balance the tills from my own pocket.

Of course. Why would you do your job properly and risk missing out on your bonus?

It’s that sort of shit that gives retail a bad rep.

@WhatToDoAboutThis2017

Who mentioned retail and why would doing this give any industry a bad name? It seems @DSHathawayGivesMeFannyGallops did exactly the same.

The metrics I was measured on for a bonus (up to 35% of my salary) were;

wage percentage
year on year takings
stock control
cash control (tills balancing)

What do you think is so wrong with overs being used to balance unders in the medium term? I would never steal the money - it always stayed within the company and, as I've said, I covered unders from my own pocket.

Again, how does this petty cash balancing give anything a bad rep?

I've never actually heard anyone saying the amount of money they are handing over as they pay so that's a new one to me*
It's quite common. I used to hear it a lot when i worked in bars.
If i hand over a 20 for payment of something less than £10 I say ' sorry, ive only got a 20' it's a habit I've got in to and it helps reduce any misunderstandings.

During my days as a Saturday worker at McDonald’s, if your till was up or down by more than a £1 then you had some explaining to do! More training was usually in order.

Because the "overs" @Whattodo means aren't significant amounts of cash. A very large or busy shop will see more small discrepancies anyway. Recording each missing penny or declaring every dropped penny when they could balance each other out is pointless. Save it for bigger, proper discrepancies resulting from actual problems -which is what companies are interested in. We also do checks during the day and we know enough to leave totals alone if we think someone is on the take, to get a pattern.

Handling errors may also balance out over till sessions or the change may turn out to be +/- on money changed from a safe or another till, or a cash mistake will rectify itself. Cash-ups can be +/- on individual tills but your banking cash-up will be correct if they match or your safe matches the +/-.

We can trace patterns, check cctv footage, have procedure to follow, have back data on our systems and get a feel for amounts that look like accidents or look dodgy.

@JustMarried - I've got colleagues who used to manage Maccys, they are very tight auditors- come round frequently and very tight controls on everything. Doesn't surprise me.

Radiogagoo Did you not point it out when you saw them doing t again????

computationalAspects I was using retail as an umbrella term to cover anything from actual shops to restaurants to nightclubs or even further.

Loss prevention rules exist for a good reason; you shouldn’t have been giving money out of your own pocket for unders and you shouldn’t have been deliberately not declaring to head office. You know that, and if they’d known that you could have been in serious trouble and quite easily could have lost your job.

If you’re fiddling the cash (and attempting to justify it as being for good too), that is not giving off a good reputation.

Oh dear yourself. The whole idea is she pockets the 5.

Blimey, This thread is from 2018!
Why has it been resurrected!