Your neighbor is a terrorist!

[Eldezar]

My experience in whether or not it is faster or slower varies upon the vendor. Personally, from working fast food, as long as you weren't using exact change, I could get your money out way faster than the credit card machine.

However, grocery stores seem to have a higher quality card machine than fast food so I generally get through much faster than with cash. Just varies. And of course sometimes you have an idiot cashier.

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by McTahr

As a cashier, I just have one thing to say:

Fuck check writers in their stupid f-

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cocksmuggling shithole paper-pushing motherf-

Etcetera!

I covered for cashiers a few times, and I fully support this.

Still found people who pay with cash more annoying though. As a person who wasn't ACTUALLY a cashier, my sliding money in and out of slots skills never really got all that advanced so I wasn't very quick with it.

Debit cards were just easy as hell, though. Even for a newbie like me. Push a button. Done.

Originally Posted by Eldezar

My experience in whether or not it is faster or slower varies upon the vendor. Personally, from working fast food, as long as you weren't using exact change, I could get your money out way faster than the credit card machine.

However, grocery stores seem to have a higher quality card machine than fast food so I generally get through much faster than with cash. Just varies. And of course sometimes you have an idiot cashier.

Fast food card machines suck. Subway seems to have an OK one, but Walmart/Super One/wherever that isn't a restaurant I pay by credit I slide my card, they hit the 'pay by credit button' and I sign something, and it is done.

At restaurants there seems to be a significant lag and they almost always have to type some stuff into their machine and wait for the ticker tape parade. It's vaguely annoying, really.

[Magus]

The reason debit cards can take a longer time than they should is older people who don't know how to work them learning how to use them, which they never really do. I drove my mother to the store today and she got confused by the fact that this particular store requires you to type in your pin for debit as opposed to letting you sign your name for credit, so rather than let her stand there for five minutes in a daze I just typed it in for her. Another time I remember prompting her to sign her name, etc.

To be sure, it isn't necessarily helped by those ones that automatically go into debit mode, so you have to hit cancel and then hit credit, then sign your name and hit OK (and they put OK over on the left instead of the right for some idiotic reason so half the time people accidentally cancel out of it instead of hitting OK, can anyone explain why they all do that? Was it to make left-handed people not feel put out or something in our greater right-handed society?), which also confuses old people no matter how many times they do it.

Thus it isn't that debit cards take longer it's just old people again...but seriously they are still a million times faster than an old person signing a check.

And don't any of you go "that's ageist, there are some young people who don't know how to use debit cards", because no, there aren't any, really. The worst thing young people do is overdraw their bank accounts, they are all caught up on how to work the card reader, though.

EDIT: Also that poster is about as Orwellian as you can get and the combination of the ad exhorting you to report your neighbors for suspicious activity is just about as spot-on as you can get.

[pochercoaster]

As a cashier at a fast food restaurant I greatly prefer cash to the debit/card machine because it's extremely, extremely slow. Customers always look confused when they use it too and it takes them 5 minutes to enter their pin. (Not really, but yeah...) At my old job I served literally hundreds of customers a day so I can count change at lightning speed.

But you know what bugs me? People who count out their change and put it on the counter and then leave it there instead of handing it to me. The way my till is set up makes it extremely awkward to grab any change that's in front of my gigantic cash register. My usual solution to this is to put the customer's change (in which I deliberately include as many dimes and pennies as possible) on the counter and then let them pick it up. They learn pretty fast.

Edit: Also the United States is weird; here we don't combine our debit and credit cards- the machine just knows what prompt to display when you swipe the card. And all our debit cards require you to enter your PIN, and many newer credit cards require a PIN now too. So entering your PIN isn't standard in the States for debit? :S

Edit 2: Oh yeah, and I don't like American money. I can tell our bills apart just by their colour; American money you have to actually read. It's also very easy to spot fake Canadian bills.

[Magus]

If I put it on the counter I try to slide it over to where the cashier can reach it. We aren't animals. People need to learn to slide cash into reasonable vectors of attainment. In fact you should put a sign up requesting customers do that using those exact words.

EDIT: Some bank cards have credit or debit options, if you want debit you put in a pin, if you want credit you cancel and hit credit and sign it electronically on the touch screen thingy (which is actually more like a check in a way, so it actually makes more sense for a check card to sign, but yeah, they also have the pin option). Although I've noticed at gas stations if you want credit you type in your zip code as opposed to signing with a touch screen.

I'm actually not sure of the difference between the two since it's all coming out of your bank account, although with at least one of my bank cards if you choose credit you get cash back but if you just do debit you don't, and I have no idea how it's "credit" because it's debited from your bank account just like with debit. Maybe there is a delay of sorts if you just sign, kind of like with a check or something...

[pochercoaster]

Indeed- if they slide it over to me that's fine, but the counter at my current job literally has no space and you can't really slide the change into an ergonomic spot. At my old job at Tim Hortons I had a nice big counter, so I never minded when customers put their change down then because I could easily just slide it into the palm of my hand.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Yeah, if you seperate your credit/debit cards it is also much easier.
Colouring your money also makes that shit much faster.

[Geminex]

Only coloring doesn't work unless you're using primitive paper-bills.

Australia: Because we have plastic money.

[Meister]

And another government ploy to create a totalitarian, fear-based society goes all but unnoticed because people prefer to care about petty everyday annoyances.

This is a subtle hint to get back on the original topic

[Krylo]

But there's not much to say about the original topic.

I mean it's like... the poster looks like the cover of 1984. Where do you go from that?