The
world of commerce is increasingly geared towards a cashless system these days,
with card payments and mobile phone scans being encouraged. Good old fashioned
cash is looked down on in a lot of places now, in particular when it comes to
big purchases. There is an element of surveillance involved of course, you can
be tracked via card payments and travel cards although what this information is
used for I still don’t really know. In the 1990s I published a series of pamphlets,
(there’s something the Internet took away, the pamphlet) about how to safeguard
your privacy which offered advice on hiding your electronic footprint and
keeping out of the prying eyes of the men in grey suits. As a sign of the
times, only paper copies of these still exist. I have some in storage and might
publish them again electronically if I ever get round to bringing my storage
container home, maybe there are still copies laying at the bottom of drawers
around the country. It was a paper pamphlet available by post, it sounds
medieval today.
Moving
financial transactions towards electronic means rather than the folding stuff
is also a way of removing the black economy and forcing everyone to declare
every penny earned; the days of freelance workers keeping two sets of books
(one for customers who will pay the full price and ask for a receipt and one
for customers who pay cash and don’t ask questions) could be numbered.
Another
tradition that barcodes and till ID has all but eroded is the practise of
‘under-ringing’. Years ago I worked for a prominent bar owner in Redcar who had
three bars, a nightclub, and a restaurant but no idea about bookkeeping and
stock control. All deliveries went to one particular business and from there
items got ferried around to where they were needed. As a result of this, and
the fact that the till wasn’t itemised, the bar staff were all on a pretty good
fiddle. What made it better was that all the prices were round and therefore
easy to add up in your head. What the customer had to pay and what went in the
till were two totally different figures, and things got so good that our pay-packets
(those much missed little square brown envelopes) went unopened and languished
in a safe place. I’m glad to be out of the trade now with all the cameras and
itemisation meaning that I would now have to simply take home a barman’s wage.
Incidentally,
Redcar Job Centre’s car park was usually busy with decorator’s vans and pizza
mopeds as people nipped in to sign on in their lunch hour.
The
reason I bring this up is because of something that happened today which made
me realise that such fiddles still exist. I have seen this happen before, the
shop immediately in front of you when you get off the tram at Radford Road for
one, so it seems confined to franchised shops such as Costcutter or Londis (a
funnier shop than Spar – a back reference for people who read the blog every
day and pay attention). On my way to collect Jack after work I popped in to a
shop on Mansfield Road to buy a can of energy drink costing 55p and I had the
exact money in my hand. In front of me in the queue was a customer paying by
card, nice and official. The guy behind the counter took my 55p while the card
was processing and put it in the till using only one button, which I gather was
the ‘no sale’ button. Under-ringing is alive and well, up yours tax man!
===
February housekeeping
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