Is the entire
world of buy and sell today negotiable? Or is there just an ignorant conspiracy
that just doesn’t care and if you don’t challenge it, you lose.
I find that I
can no longer stop myself from reading purchase receipts. I have watched others, mostly seniors on
fixed incomes, do this for years. Some
mistakes seem to be penny bag types while others are egregious errors.
Don’t know
what a penny bag is? When I was much
younger and a new principal, I was told about the penny bag concept by a
retired finance person. She explained
that the monies collected in a school on a daily basis never seemed to come out
right so she kept a penny bag to add or subtract from the daily totals to make
sure things (the bottom line) were correct.
This was shocking to me and I was happy that she was retired because isn’t
the bottom line, the bottom line? Doesn’t
my checkbook always have to be exact?
We have
raised a group of money collectors, credit card chargers, who cannot add, are
too lazy to care, or rely too heavily on the machines in front of them to even “think”
in any way. The first shock came many
years ago when McDonalds changed all of their registers to pictograms of the
food without word identifiers. It was their
expectation that someone who applied and worked at McDonalds could not read or
make change. The problem is they were
right to remove this thinking requirement from their staff.
What have we
done to the current generation? Considering
the fact that this type of slippage in the education system was orchestrated by
our generation, who is to blame?
I prefer to
scan my own food at the checkout because I can watch the prices more carefully
but who sets up the scanner and am I fooling myself that this is better? Who calibrates the scale upon which I place my
fruit? Who sets the codes for the bar reader?
We are in trouble
and unless we challenge purchases on a regular basis, we lose money
everyday. I often resented the people in
the line ahead of me who challenged something and then we all waited while the
blinking light had to be reset to correct some small error, or so I thought.
It’s not just
about the money but, to me, today, it’s more about the deterioration of our
society; the educational deficiencies noticed on a daily basis. And responsibility for this deficiency, what
of that? I would have been mortified as a teenager if I gave the wrong change
and I had to calculate it in my head. This generation just looks back at you
with a blank stare not even understanding the value of the money you’re
discussing.
I have moved
recently and so I am stimulating the economy. I have purchased a number of
items that needed to be returned. The
return was no problem in any of the stores I frequented, no questions
asked. But when I tried to explain that
there was a qualitative problem with the item and I was returning it for a very
specific reason; I received a blank “I don’t really care” stare and an
unfeeling, sign this receipt look.
So I say to
you all, challenge each receipt, hold the stores and their employees to task,
or you may be told that your bill is more than it should be. Maybe if we hold them accountable, things
will change???
We are from a generation that was financially poor but raised with the idea that you had to work for everything starting with your education. We saw how our mother struggled and we knew we would do better, although our struggles would be different. No one in those times tried to make the path easier. No one tried to equalize the way because we were poor, having a single parent mother or women. We did it the old fashioned way, we earned it.
ReplyDeleteIt is very hard today to see the world today through our expectations that are as much a part of us as our eye color. We have gone from a work environment where you were not permitted personal calls to one where your cashier is playing zombies scanning your purchases. We have gone from a business environment which insisted on a receipt to one where there is no questions asked.