An unfortunate new payment center in my city’s buses, has slowed cash paying customers and expedited all the various card using passengers.
The old cash system involved an electronic reader that could count multiple coins at the same time. With the new reader you have to insert each coin one at a time. This is time consuming when the passenger has all quarters because the fare is $3.25.
If needed, in the old system, the driver would just hand you a transfer ripped off the stack with the rip showing the time down to 15 minute intervals. With the new system it takes half a minute to print up your transfer. Maybe it’s the slowness of the printer or maybe it needs a few precious seconds for the ink to dry. Either way it’s annoying to everyone.
Now, clearly it’s the payment center’s fault that cash transactions are so slow. Still, in the name of speed I would like it if everyone could convince the cash payers to switch payment methods. Knowing the power of cheering on the home team, I intend to cheer every time a new bus passenger swipes their various cards.
Of course I’ll have to also boo the people using cash. I can boo for as long as it takes for the cash paying person to finally be free of the payment center at the front of the bus.
I know, some of you are thinking this is too harsh. But think about it. When a bunch of passengers are all trying to get on the bus as fast as possible and it’s pouring rain, that minute the cash paying person is using means that the rest of us get wet for that length of time. They could be noble and say “No, you go first – I’m paying cash,” and wave all of us card paying people first. But they never do so I am going to try the booing gambit.
This cheering/booing thing might work in stores, too. Here, paying with cash or cards seem to take about the same time. So I suggest you cheer on either one or both as that may make them even faster (Hey! Every second counts.)
The ones I want you to boo are the price matchers. You know the people who have looked at sales items all across town but only shop at this closest store. For every single item they get they must show the cashier each one and the cashier has to put it in and give the better price. I suggest we boo them into submission. So much so that they never price match again.
“What’s that? You paid how much for those items? It is such a good deal that you hear cheering in your head that is much louder than the external boos that we are making for you?
“Maybe I ought to try price matching.” The other booers might try it, too. So if you find that every line at every store takes a long time to go through, just remember all the money we’re saving. We’re actually okay with using our time to pay for our savings.
