June 23, 2006 at 5:00 pm

i am rottent at mental arithmetic. ;_; i can’t pull these tricks. maybe brain age will help. =P

June 23, 2006 at 5:01 pm

You wouldn’t belieeeeve how much I get this in China.
‘That’s 58 RMB.’
‘Here’s 63!’
*hands me back the three 1 RMB coins, finishes ringing up, then hands me two more coins*
*I walk away in disgust by the lack of math knowledge in the world*

June 23, 2006 at 5:25 pm

You shouldn’t be allowed to work a cash register if you can’t do simple math!

June 23, 2006 at 7:29 pm

Haha, that took like a second for me to realize that.
Should have said yes to the extra dollar ;-)

June 23, 2006 at 8:59 pm

Yeah I noticed that in China proper the concept of giving consolidated change doesn’t seem to come across. I’d often get what I expected back in Hong Kong, so it could just be cultural instead of math.

Oddly enough in Japan fairly frequently the concept didn’t get understood either…. I was at a travel agency and instead of giving 40,000yen for a ticket gave 42,000 so I could get a 5,000 bill back. The person went and brought back a friend who asked me what the problem was, I told her I wasn’t aware of a problem just wanted change and she got it right away. So dunno. :p

June 23, 2006 at 11:17 pm

Yay! I’ve been absolved of ever having to work a cash register! Thank you john tv! :D
(I wish that was really a life guarentee.)

June 24, 2006 at 2:17 am

Yeah, this is the thing that I’ve got totally used to in Japan, but I know they never do it in the UK and I’m scared I’ll try it and embarrass myself when I go there.

June 24, 2006 at 2:49 am

It’s usually the people who can do math are not working cash registers, but come on the machine does it for you!

June 24, 2006 at 3:01 am

I probably would’ve been too busy slurping down my smoothie to even have noticed.

June 24, 2006 at 3:45 am

I’m with Matthew there. If you can manage elementary math, odds are you’re too smart to take a cashier’s job. =P

June 24, 2006 at 4:43 am

$4.84 for a slurpie?! I hope she kissed you first

June 24, 2006 at 4:55 am

whoops smoothie

STILL OUTRAGEOUS

June 24, 2006 at 10:38 am

Annalisa: I teach college students (upper level, even), and they can’t manage serial dilutions. Now, I know what you’re going to say, that’s fancy sciencey math, but the truth is? It’s dividing or multiplying by 10. AND THEY ARE FLUMMOXED!

My feeling is that they would be likewise stymied by the $4.84/5.34 thing.

June 25, 2006 at 9:11 pm

Hey! I have a whole degree in math, and work as a cashier (sometimes).

That said, if you can’t do the math… trust the computer. Please.

June 26, 2006 at 2:08 am

I enjoy confusing register jockeys with 50 cent and 1 dollar coins.

Ask if they accept Hawaiian dollars. That’s always good for a laugh.

June 26, 2006 at 2:36 pm

I was wondering if you would post “bad consumer experiences” to follow up on your GameSpot clerk entry. This one is fairly mild, but does nicely show how clerks in the USA don’t know when to keep their trap shut about their own ign’rance.

June 26, 2006 at 7:06 pm

happens here too. Poor gas station attendents don’t get cash registers, apparently. Then again, the combini kids get it wrong sometimes too, so who knows.

June 27, 2006 at 5:14 am

Adrienne: I need a lot of extra time doing math when I get past the realm of calculus, and for a long time I could sympathize with your students because a lot of high level math was ridiculously hard for me not so much because I couldn’t do the work, but because the terminology got to be more and more daunting in and of itself. At the college level, a lot of students have long ago internalized the belief that they’re just “not good at math”, or only “good up to this point”, often only because they’ve had impatient teachers, or have been exposed to math too soon (I find it ridiculous that children in the U.S. sometimes get started on fractions as early as 2nd grade, which is too early for certain logico-reasoning abilities to be in place for most children).

I got to understand a lot more about math in college than I ever did throughout 12 years of public school – and that’s because I learned to unpack a lot of math and make it into a logic problem, i.e., “what does it actually mean to calculate [something]?” When I was a kid, I didn’t really reason it out that way, and so it was inevitable that I would hit a wall eventually.

That said, the aforementioned math is nothing more than simple subtraction, something that an average high school freshman would have been familiar with for at least 6-7 years of school (addiction and subtraction are math skills that are a lot less brain intensive than multiplication, division, fractions, and so forth). I hate to sound harsh, but if I were to run into any 15 year old who couldn’t picture something like this in their own head:

5.34 -
4.84 =
_______
0.50

I’d have to wonder whether said kid didn’t have a learning disability…

June 27, 2006 at 4:45 pm

now, now. she probably typed in “$4.84″ immediately, or else “$5.” the register was probably telling her to give $.16 in change when she noticed the customer was adding some coins to his $5 bill. so “letting the machine do it” wasn’t possible at this point. she was just suddenly confused, is all. no need to start talking about degrees in mathematics!!

also, according to AV’s transcript, she stressed the “84,” where he stressed the “5,” leading me to believe that she might have thought he’d just given her 84 cents instead of 34. either way, she just threw it into the cash register.

you try being 100% attentive when INTERNET BLOGGERS have been sneeringly buying smoothies from YOU all day!!

also, yeah, she was probably kind of dumb.

February 1, 2007 at 8:38 pm

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh………………………………………… this is so stupid,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, its really none of my business……………………………….. my gosh,,,,,,,,,,,,,!!!!!

February 1, 2007 at 8:43 pm

hahahahahahahahah…… Are you my first kiss and first uhm uhm uhm uhm,,,,, coz im looking for her…… is that you?