Suppose you think you are being asked for £10.23 & you have a £20 plus change, so you put in 23p then the note, only to be met by a cascade of change.
It turns out that you owed only £9.79 after the balance due was adjusted for the two-for-one offer you took advantage of.
Fortunately (for my temper at the end of a hard day), a checkout assistant to whom I moaned one day showed me how to find out the true total – just press Go Back at a certain point in the transaction.
But then another small mystery: sometimes the total remained unaltered, even though there was some kind of discounted purchase in my selection. All sorts of explanations went though my mind – might it actually reveal useful information about who (supplier or supermarket) was financing the offer? That would explain why it would go into a different column in the accounts.
I am disappointed to think that the explanation may after all be more mundane – a straightforward 25% off all clothing can be calculated as soon as the bar code is recognised by the computer: multi-buy offers can only be recognised after all items are tallied.
Still, at least I won’t be thinking about it any more.
Perhaps I should just get over this business with change completely & do what everybody else does, pay by plastic for everything. But that would be an awful lot more checking of accounts at the end of the month – especially as there seems to be an increasing number of scams which involve skimming off only small amounts from lots & lots of bills – the sort of sum which many people wouldn’t bother to report, even if they noticed it in the first place.
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Counting the change
Going round the bend
Counting the change
Going round the bend
