When did they stop counting change?

[Bicycle Bill]

My fianceé has gone back to work on a part-time basis at Dollar Tree.   She's employed as a cashier/floor worker, and has been at it for a little more than a week — and of course, as part of her end-of-shift duties, she has to balance out her cash drawer.

Now, back in the day when I worked as a cashier in a supermarket, we had to do the same thing, so we would physically count the money — take out the bills and count them; add up the checks; and count the change.    Being the perfectionist/stickler for accuracy that I was, I would generally count my drawer twice, just to make sure I got it right.

But do they do that nowadays?   Hell, no!   My Marie tells me that they WEIGH the money — bills and change — rather than count it.   Now I don't know about you, but this seems guaranteed to lead to errors.   Let me explain.

Back in 1982, the government went from making pennies out of 95% copper to making them out of copper-plated zinc (97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper).   And of course, there is a weight difference — the older coins weighed 3.1 grams each, but the newer ones are lighter at 2.5 grams — so the weight difference between a roll of all-copper pennies and the newer copper-plated ones adds up to 30 grams ... or roughly ten or eleven pennies.

Same thing with quarters.   Prior to 1964, quarters were made out of 90% silver and weighed 6.25 grams each.   Then they started making them out of nickel-plated copper (25% nickel, 75% copper) in 1965, and these 'sandwich' coins are lighter, coming in at 5.67 grams each.   Again, there could be a variance of up to 25 grams (or five coins) between a roll of pre-1965 quarters and the modern ones.

And this, of course, does not take into account the possibly of a Canadian coin or two — this is Wisconsin, after all, and that's not all that uncommon — or other foreign coin (and their weight differences vis-à-vis genuine US coinage) finding its way into the mix.

Putting it bluntly, while this process does eliminate the need for today's math-challenged youths to have to count above six, this sounds like a system almost certain to create error and inaccuracy.

-"BB"-

[Big RR]

It's not going to be 100% accurate, but I would imagine there are statistics of the quantities of older and newer coins in circulation which could be used to arrive at an average weight; this could be updated each year to account for any shift in the mix. Using this, I would think a very good estimate could be generated by weight--there will be some error, but if I were selling the machines I would say this would be more than compensated for by the savings in not paying cashiers for the manual counting of coins, and this amount could be written off after the coins are counted and rolled. Indeed, there could be a single person responsible for counting all drawers using the machine, and this would save considerably on the costs.

Now as for biils, I always thought al bills weighed the same, but there are bill counters that can distinguish and sort them.

[Scooter]

Plus all retailers recognize that, when processing thousands of dollars of cash transactions per day, there is going to be some amount of error, whether in keying or in giving out change. I can't see any retailer setting a tolerance for error that would be lower than what might occur by "counting" the till in this manner.