Modern Vespa

But are people getting dumber? Went to the store yesterday. Had a rain check for yogurt, 5 for $3. Bought 20 of them and the cashier couldn't figure out the math. Stood there while she got the calculator out and stared at it for a few minutes. So i said, their 60 cents a piece. She looked at her calculator again. It's been 5 minutes now, still can't figure it out and just as she was about to call the manager, i'm like it's $12. Went over the way i figured it out. What are they teaching kids in school these days? She was about 25ish. I think i could of solved that math problem in the 3rd grade.

It's you. The way you kept staring at the poor thing. Put her under so much pressure.

But i was smiling. Does that count?

i stopped to pick up some stuff at the store one day after work, the bill was 33.21, so i gave the girl 2, 20 dollar bills and .21 in coins, (i already had alot of change in my pocket, didnt need more). she handed my coins back to me and said that the 2 twenty dollar bills was enough i explained to her that i didnt want any more coins that this way she would only have to give me 7.00 back..... she had to call her manager, thought i was messin with her. it was kind of funny but yet not.

I was at the dollar store and had about 10 items. The cashier said, "Sorry, but our register is out and I won't be able to figure out the bill with the tax"

I asked him what the tax rate was, knowing it was 5%.

I told him to add a nickel for every item, which gives you $10.50

He looked at me like i was the human calculator.


For this ^^^ I play a game with the kids. I'll throw out a number and they respond back with the other number that will make 100.

Life here is a blast from the past. Cashiers do not need a change calculating cash register. If you give them loose coins to cover odd prices, as did mikenpalsie, they are totally nonplussed. They can figure a tab in their head, adding up cafe bills without a calculator.

I get that mostly when I give say a twenty and a single for a $5.73 total. I've already got 4 singles in my pocket, I don't need 4 more. Just give me a ten and a five.

AV your lucky. Sadly our school systems and parents aren't doing their jobs so good anymore. Kids in 3rd world countries can do currency conversions in their heads but not here.

I've started paying for everything with a credit card.** I avoid the math challenged cashier's and get miles to boot! Just have to make sure I pay it off every cycle to avoid finance charges.

** - except when I'm at the bar; then it's cash only...don't want a paper trail there...

I see less and less common sense in just about everything. Kids all have smart phones and computers and just don't have to think for themselves as much any more. I think of life as a chess game, ya have to be thinking a couple of steps ahead or you'll lose out. And, we have to be aware of where we've been to get to where we're going.

Good thought for the day: Its not always a good idea to tell someone "just be yourself."

It is just you. The good old days never existed and stupid is eternal

$12 eh?

There you go.

How many fingers do most people have?

I felt the same way, but then a (very) few years ago we were in the Colorado Mountains and stopped at a small General Store where a small girl, maybe 8 or 9, was tending a cash box selling soft drinks. I gave her a twenty, she pulled the correct change out of the cash box and counted it back to us; this many coins to the nearest dollar, this many singles to the nearest five... right up to the twenty bucks I gave her. We were ed.

So it's not just you and it's not everywhere (but it's most places, I think).

I have dyscalculia and making change like that hurts my brain. I can't do crap for math on the fly. That's why I'm a computer programmer, so I can just tell the computer to do the maths

Last week a young cashier actually counted my change back to me...correctly! I guess it only stands out because it doesn't happen around here much. I asked her about it and she said that the manager insists that they count change back to each customer. I also noticed that after checking the 20 I had given her she laid in on the cash drawer while she counted back my change and didn't put it in the drawer until I had pocketed my change. I felt like I was in a time warp.

It's just arithmetic. That's the scary part.

Yea, Colorado! That's how I was taught to count change in 1970-something.

It *might* have been Vermont.

Had to look it up

"nonplussed" has two meanings, exactly opposite of each other.

Judy, it's not you. I like to do that to manage the bills and coins in my pocket. Confused cashiers aren't that rare, sadly. I think in part because many kids don't use currency anymore. It's just a swipe.

Off on a related tangent. I think money had more meaning when you worked, got a check, went to the bank, deposited most of it, and kept some out until the next check. It was easier to see the cost of something in terms of how hard you worked for the dollars. I got my niece to equate how many hours she worked at the mall to pay for some of the silly things she bought. She's now quite responsible with her $. Now with direct deposit, automatic transfers and so forth, one works and watches numbers get bigger and smaller on the computer. It just doesn't feel like money any more.

I teach math, 9th grade this year. No calculators in my class for the first 4 months, the students nearly died in the beginning, but got over it pretty fast.

They got really excited when I said we would be using calculators to find max and min's on graphs, until they found it was quicker and less work to do it by hand, which I had taught them before.

Its all in the training.

I went to the Zoo last year with my daughter and bought 2 coins for the train that drove in the circle there, $2 each. I paid with a $20 dollar bill. It took the late teen lady at least 7 minutes and 4 time the incorrect change to figure it out. I did not let her off the hook by telling her the answer either, but guided her there slowly.

Meh. The same could be said for a lot of things. Some people are poor at math, some are good at it. Some people aren't interesting to watch pump gas, others are. While I can negotiate the credit card terminal at the grocery store, others cannot. If you want entertainment watch people using self checkout kiosks at the grocery, its like they're attempting space travel or something.

People have become dependent on technology to do the work for them so its no surprise mundane tasks have become difficult for them.

Think of it this way, if so inclined you could make a great living being a short change artist with these math deficient individuals out there.

I hope you're not writing software for NASA.

Technology has made everything easier. So much so, that the U.S. ranks below average in Science and Math (Maths for non-Americans).

http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-rankings-2013-12

Good thing we still know how to put a sentence together.

People in glass houses should not throw stones.

Some people's spelling is as bad as the math they are complaining about

a lot of it is because people dont go to pubs

i go to the pub i play darts

darts uses maths so makes me fairly good and quick at adding up

I don't think I've ever encountered this problem before, everywhere I've been has a till and the till works it out for you. After entering all your items and subtotaling it, you just count the cash they've given you, punch it into the till and it tells you how much you need to give back?

something i heard on the radio ......
'if you think the youth of today are clueless look at whos raising them'

Yeah... I think that's it.

You're assuming here that they know how to operate a till effectively.

Mocker i remember the good old days. I know what you were doing then but i'm probably a tad older than you tho. Daisey not every till does it for you. I had a rain check so she had to figure out what to put in the till. So sad and yes the people who are raising them aren't much better. They should know better but don't care.

And here I thought it was just me! Welcome to 30 years after the calculator age. I do the checkbook by hand, then run the calculator to ensure I didn't screw up.

I wonder if the multiplication tables are still taught....

There just seems to be a decreasing level of cognitive processing (one own's brain).

Had similar situation a couple of days ago with a cashier that I have dealth with a local CVS store. I picked up an item and realized that I had a $3.00 credit (had to use it in 7 days or lose it). Went back in line and asked to return the item just purchased and repurchase with credit certificate.

She processed the credit and told me to sign the refund slip which I did and she tucked it away in slot under the cash box. She then rang up the other item and asked for amount. I asked her if she wanted to give me my refund first so I could pay with that and then she asked me for the signed refund receipt...I pointed to the slot in the drawer and told her I gave it to her and she placed it in the drawer.

There was a blank expression and the line was getting longer. I simply showed her my copy of the refund and this is what she owed me and I could get that first and pay her or she could just subtract the re-rung purchased amount and give me the difference...again a confused look. However, we finally got it sorted out and I was on my way.

But that's not the end of it...a young lady (same age as cashier) standing right behind me carrying an infant was upset because I was being too hard on the cashier...I don't get it.

Perhaps I could have spoken in a more delicate manner and taken out a notepad and explained the refund process...which I could...but shouldn't this type of cognitive analysis should be engrained in these new customer service workers?

By the way, I personally work in several cashier positions while going thru school and it seems like we prided ourselves in working thru figuring out different change scenarios. Customers often gave use a mix of cash to minimize the amount of "silver" in their pockets.

We'll see how this all turns out...perhaps we'll be ending up with stores more self serve check outs.

Something interesting and semi-related just happened to me. I had a client, about 17 give me a $100 bill to pay for a haircut. When I gave him his change two tens stuck together. 15 minutes later he came in to give it back to me. Maybe there's hope.

8 or 4 and 4

When I was a teen, back in the 70's, I got a job in our town's only grocery store (nine aisles). The cash registers were the ones with the long-throw buttons, and when depressed, the appropriate numeral would lift up and display in a glass housing for all the world to see. They would calculate nothing except to keep a running total, and if a customer wanted to put something back, this amount would have to be subtracted from the total, at the end of the transaction. All tax due had to be figured out by the cashier.

The store's owners would give people about two hours in which to come up to speed or be shown the door. They told me I could stay..... I used my newly-found financial freedom to purchase my first motorcycle, a used 1972 Yamaha 125cc street legal enduro; the fancy one with electric start, in addition to the kick starter.

There was a real stigma attached with being labeled as having insufficient skills to work in that local store.

Meh.

I worked in fast food in the mid 80s. I worked the drive through because it required doing change without the register.

I was the only one that came within a few cents to a dollar over/under during my shift.

The worst part of early onset dementia. But they can't all be a half bubble off. Or maybe..

Good point. Some are well over half.

On the other hand, some older, more responsible people put a dollar (cents, actually) value on lives lost in the cars they made and sold.

One of the benefits of Amazon prime: not having to deal with cashiers and change. Buy stuff. It usually shows up on my doorstep in a couple of hours, a day, or two days, at my option.

I got to point of having to dumb down transactions to avoid problems with change. Cashiers would hand me back my "extra" money and not even attempt to press the numbers for the cash into the register. I would have to ask them to just press the buttons for the money I gave them to let it do the math for them. They still often ended up confused as they handed me a 5 or 10 dollar bill, as if they weren't sure if this was some sort of scam because now they are giving me more money back than they expected. Now I mostly use a separate debit card for the limited transactions I do. Cashiers seem to handle card swipes without having to think about it.

I also gave up trying to use coupons with special rules that cashiers and managers never seem to get right, like at a restaurant with a buy one entree get one free (or X% amount off), on an item of equal or lesser value up to a $9 value. Having entrees of different prices for a party of 3 or more seems to always screw them up. I tried to explain how "equal or lessor" doesn't mean they can just apply the discount on the lowest price entree. They seemed to think that "lessor" meant they should apply the discount to the lowest price. No, that's not how it works. When I told them that the discount applies to the "second highest" entree, it was like I was speaking a foreign language to them or like trying to explain algebra and logic to five year olds. "What is this strange second highest thing of which you speak"

I didn't even want to use the coupon for myself, but it was for family members who were coupon clippers. I refused to go back to those restaurants with those relatives. I just wanted the coupon done right, not to get into a debate and lecture on coupon rules.

That is funny because I was in Vermont in the 1970's and worked at McDonalds in Burlington for a bit when they still had cash registers that you punched prices into. Since we knew the entire menu and prices by heart, our game at the counter was to add things in our head as the customer ordered them and quote the total price within a few seconds.
Now you'd get fired if you tried that! The food ain't as good either!
[/curmudgeon]