The Five and Dime
You’re working at Bob’s Five and Dime. You’ve got a great job there as a cashier. With five stores in the area, you have a lot of business. And business has been good. One interesting thing about Bob’s… it’s a cash-only business. And you love it, because as a cashier, you get to make change.
Making change is your passion. You love the idea of optimizing on the number of coins returned, or even the weight of the coins returned. You follow what’s going on at the national mints, and there are rumors of a new twenty-cent piece coming soon, that will revolutionize the change-making game. You write up a white paper talking about how exciting this is, and it gets good reviews from your management.
Bob’s acquires a couple of other stores in your region… but these stores also work with these new-fangled “credit cards”. The cashiers from those stores prefer the credit cards, and that confuses you. Cashiers should be interested in making change, and these cashiers prefer a cash-less transaction. They say things about “it makes refunds and exchanges a lot easier” but refunds and exchanges were never your problem. Besides, your customers love how you give them your change.
Some of your cashiers go and work at these new franchises, and they love the idea. They still make change once in a while, but they talk about how they’re “solving bigger problems”. You also have customers coming to your store asking to use a credit card, because they’ve been to these new franchises. You have to turn them away. Bob’s Five and Dime does business in cash and you don’t need their credit cards.
Bob reaches retirement age and sells out to a national chain, MegaDrug. At the initial introduction meeting, MegaDrug talks about how credit cards are the future: they can tie them into the inventory and purchasing, making sure the shelves are always stocked. They can cut their prices by using credit cards matched to customer accounts and create custom shopping lists and discounts. Knowledgable cashiers can use this information to make recommendations at the point of sale to save their customers more money on the products they buy. MegaDrug has been making good money with this model for years.
This really upsets you. You don’t hear anything at all about making change, so you ask about it in the all hands. New management says “of course we still take cash” so you’re pretty relieved that you get to continue your passion about making change.
A year goes by and your new bosses are asking you why you haven’t been using the credit card machine at your till. And why you’re not making sales recommendations. You gently remind them that your culture is about making change, and that’s what your customers want. Then you remind them about the twenty cent piece and ask why you haven’t been promoted about that yet. The conversation does not go well.
Meanwhile the sales people seem to get it. You see in the flyers “Come bring your cash to Bob’s Five and Dime (now MegaDrug)”. But you hear that the marketing people are getting in trouble for that and they need to drop the Bob’s branding. In fact, you hear the guy in charge got demoted, but that’s probably just the rumor mill.
More time goes by, and you’ve been denied the promotion. You figure its a bias against the cash culture because you’ve been having a lot of conversations with management about using the credit card machines and making recommendations at the point of sale. You keep reminding your bosses that you’re not a salesperson, that you’re a cashier but they don’t seem to get it.
The last straw finally comes when a girl who got hired only a year ago got the promotion you’ve been gunning for. At a store that only does five cash transactions a week. How can she be getting a cashier promotion when she’s never making change? Apparently she got it for recommending a forward-looking ordering process, which seems like a business problem, not a change-making problem. And you’re having trouble seeing yourself staying at a place that values cashiers solving business problems.
