A Sale Is A Sale, A Fail Is A Fail

The store building at this petrol station is tiny. We only sell cigarettes, snacks, drinks, air fresheners, and that sort of thing.

There is no cash register at all; we have a desk calculator and a clipboard. That’s it. Instead, to balance the till, you do a complete inventory of the store at the beginning and end of every shift — so many of each type of chocolate bar, flavour of chips, type of soda, etc. — noting the numbers on an inventory sheet. It isn’t too onerous, as there are only something like a hundred different items in the store.

You subtract the number of each left at the end of the shift from the number at the start of the shift, multiply by the price, add all the items’ amounts up, and that’s what your till should contain. It works surprisingly well.

Working the overnight graveyard shift — 11:00 pm to 7:00 am — you see some real characters. One night as I was finishing my shift, a guy came in and saw what I was doing. He asked about it, and I explained. He then spoke cockily about how he could make life difficult for me by buying a bunch of different things and how I would have to recount everything.

So, he did, in fact, buy a dozen things, gloating about how much work he was causing me. After handing him his change, I quickly scratched out “17” and wrote “16” for the first item and went down the sheet changing the number for each of the things he bought.

I guess he forgot about subtraction. He stormed out, unhappy.