Would this make transactions easier, or rediculously and unnecessarily complex?

I don’t want you working on the registers on my store, okay? If I ever have a store, that is.

People need receipts for the transactions that they make. Is Juanita going to give Joe a receipt for his $10 purchase? How can you verify that it’s valid when Joe comes back to the store next week to make a return?

I think it’s a nice “idea,” but in the end, I don’t think the process would actually save any work. It would just take the burden off of the employee and put it on the customer, which no organization wants.

So what if you could go to the grocery and just pay $800 for your groceries and have all your bills covered. Or someone just rang the door at your house and said here is ten grand….for when you go buy that coke later.

The difference you are not seeing, I think, is that Joe and Juanita aren’t having a transaction together, but they are both engaging in commerce with you. If Joe gives his $10 to Juanita, she’d better be giving him $10 worth of poptarts and cola. But she’s not and you are. So while the actual $10 bill may be the same, the thing it represents (value) is different each time.

Overly complicated. Everyone would have to communicate to each other, in advance, what they want to purchase and how much it costs and make sure that it is actually true, both the intent and the price. Then they must ensure the correct order of purchase. If Joe has given 10 quid to Juanita, he then comes first to you and says “Give me that product for free, a woman will come later and pay for it.” Then it must be confirmed that the product he wants from you is actually the product Joe and Juanita agreed on Joe buying. Then Juanita comes to pay for both her and Joes products and it must be enforced somehow that she actually pays for Joe’s purchase and not just says “I have no Idea what you are talking about, I agreed to no such thing.” and ends up not paying for the Joe, keeping the 10 quid for herself, leaving you with 10 quid short.
Completely unfeasible.

They call that micromanagement and it’s not helpful.

A business has to keep track of the money going in and the money going out. You can’t track it if it is exchanged outside the actual transaction and trying to keep track of it in the kind of system would not save energy at all, because instead of having one place, one person, the cash register and the cashier processing all transactions, you would have everybody involved in processing transactions. It would be an accounting nightmare. Plus that’s they way money works, the individual $20 and $10 dollar bills are nothing but pieces of paper, it is the “value” that they represent that matters.

Don’t persuade yourselves that I did not already understand that this is silly and incorrect, I just think there is something going on here that might be helpful SOMEHOW, maybe I can’t see it, and maybe someone else could.

You may be good at math sure, but most people, sadly most cashiers, are not. Hell i have a hard enough time getting the proper change my own transaction half the time. I see this causing mass problems and probably a lot of lost money for the store. As far as the whole network idea, while i could work, it would make checking out of a store a retardedly long process.

@Ltryptophan How can I avoid persuading myself that this idea is silly and incorrect if the person asking the question acknowledges that it is silly and incorrect? Could you possibly elaborate and clarify your idea so that we too can see the “SOMEHOW” and perhaps the SOMETHING that you see? Obviously we’re not getting it. Can you help us?

I can not help you lillycoyote.

My business professor had a talk with the class that I think illustrates what you’re getting at. He said that when there is more trust between a business and its customers, the end result is a lower cost of doing business and either more profit for the business or more value for the customer. For example, if you’re a regular customer at a grocery store, you may decide that you trust them enough not to need a receipt. A little bit of paper and ink is a very small expense, but you’d be cutting an expense for something that doesn’t have any intrinsic value to either the customer or the business. Or marketing- it’s a lot cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to bring a new one to your business. If a company knows they have your business, they can spend less money on marketing, and they can either lower costs or raise their profits.

This is a pretty simple explanation, but anyway… the value of your idea is that if it worked, it would cut costs for the store. They’d be able to pay you less for doing less work, because you would be passing the work onto the customer. Or, if this way turned out to be quicker, you could process more orders in the same amount of time for the same time, and increase profits. There might be tiny savings from not printing receipts or from using less electricity because you operate the cash register less. The biggest problem with the idea is that you have to enter every transaction, otherwise the management has no idea what people are buying. I’m a retail manager and a big part of my job is using our past sales to predict what people will buy in the future, and decide what we should sell and how much of it. If I don’t get it right, we’ll have too much of something people don’t want and lose money because we can’t sell them. Or we’ll be out of something people do want and again, lose money.

@lillycoyote be more like Haleth. There’s your help.

@Ltryptophan I can’t be more like @Haleth. I can only be myself, I can only be who I am. If that isn’t good enough for you, if you want and expect me to be someone or something else then I cannot help you. You cannot help me. We cannot help each other and I guess that is that.

You shouldn’t smoke that, dude.

you asked!

@lillycoyote But coming up with ideas based on your experience at work is valuable. It was observant of you to think of a part of your job that could be streamlined. Maybe if there was a way to just enter the items people bought so there would be a record, and then still have Bob pass $10 to Juanita at the end of the transaction, it could work!