I had a friend who worked as a developer for a large bank. She said nearly all paper check transactions are scrutinized these days because they all trigger automated fraud flags.
I think now a days it’s only a thing with older people. I was at Meijer the other day walking toward the self checkout and I walked past an elderly woman writing a check as she was waiting in a cashiered line.
Yeah but that lady would have been told “Nope, come back with cash, credit or debit” over here. Heck, I had cashier jobs in the early 2000s and we didn’t accept checks!
I always thought it was kinda fun when I worked retail honestly lmao. People rarely paid with checks so I rarely got to use the machine that you stick it in and it goes KA-CHUNK.
Why would they sweat? You just input the amount of the check, stick it in the machine to get franked, and the till opens. It’s not much more complicated than cash and way easier than damn WIC (great program, lousy execution).
Handing them a check isn’t a problem. What sucks is when the customer pulls OUT the check book to slowly fill it out, AFTER you told them the total, while your line backs up and it fucks your metrics.
Shitty, but you could easily tie the time-per-customer to the number of items, then standardize around item-time. Compare that to the number customers, and bob’s your uncle.
I worked in the tech space for grocery during the period where a lot of states were converting from paper WIC checks to an eWIC or SmartWIC setup and jesus is that system just an obtuse mess for everyone involved. It was confusing for customers, it was confusing for employees, and it was confusing for the retailers. It was damn near impossible to support and troubleshoot issues.
It’s interesting how some govt programs literally fly, faster than sound, if the end result is a loud bang.
Meanwhile ones that are ostensibly meant to help people (SSA, VA, WIC) have the lowest quality programmers and program managers fucking it up for everyone.
I can’t speak for the others that you mention, but truthfully the WIC programs were actually fairly well fleshed out and the transitions introduced a lot of much needed changes to make the program more efficient. There were just a lot of moving parts and every state handled things a little differently.
Most of the friction was coming from the fact that the changeover introduced a lot of validation and oversight that customers and retailers were not used to with the older systems.
When I was a cashier, I'd tell people that and they'd respond that it wouldn't fill out the carbon copy, so they'd just manually continuing to fill out the check anyways and hold up the line :-\
With the machine filling out the checks, it's no slower than running a credit/debit card.
When I worked as a cashier in a grocery store many years ago, someone gave me some checks to pay their bill. I didn’t even look at the damn thing, just inputted the numbers it said and started running them through the check machine. It seemed to go through the machine correctly.
But just then the manager ran over and stopped the transaction. They were fake checks.
I guess silly me assumed things would just automatically not go through in the modern age, but I guess it showed me that I really have no idea how check machines like that work.
Still don’t, but I don’t work that job anymore so it doesn’t matter.
How the machines work vary depending on the machine and POS setup. There are some that scan the check and ping the associated bank account to perform payment routing in an eCheck format, but the vast majority that I worked with just franked the check (which if you didn’t know is a glorified stamp with the transaction and deposit information for the bank to indicate the check was a part of a retail transaction). With the lower end printer models, you could run a blank piece of paper through it and it wouldn’t know the difference.
It's always some granny that wants to get cheap therapy from captive audience too, have to know how all her relatives aren't talking to her for 'silly reasons' that she wont back down from. Plus Everythings Changed here, why would YOU do that, hurhuhruhurhuhruhur, add a few more 'jokes' at your/company expense like you are responsible and now it's been 15 minuets and somehow your boss takes it out on you. This is why.
I’ve been getting better at gently shutting down customers who want to talk my ear off. I got shit to do, and as nice as I am, I’m gonna get fired if I don’t get my shit done.
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