Fired via Facebook - a U.K. first?:
"hiya Chelsea its Elaine from work. I had to tell the owner bout u losin that tenner coz obviously the till was down. she wasn't pleased and said I have to let u go. I'm really sorry. If u call in in the week with your uniform i'll sort your wages out. Elaine xx."
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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To me the worst thing about this story is a til can often be down after a shift. I recall from my coffee shop stint years before, in which I checked servers out at the end of the night in addition to working shifts as well.
ReplyDeleteSometimes tils would be up or down anywhere from $5 or $10 (or weird amounts from change errors). In fact having the exact amount expected in the til was a rarity, though anything more than a few dollars was rare as well.
Even well-meaning and diligent employees sometimes make mistakes with change, especially when things get busy or if they get interrupted while in the middle of a transaction.
To me it sounds like a simple situation where the young employee gave someone change for a twenty when they'd actually given her a ten.
My only caveat to this is that employer from long ago did keep a record of til closing amounts, by employee name (or names if multiple people were working a shift on the same til). They explained that they had in the past let go employees with consistent issues of being "under a few dollars each night." After a while, it just seemed there might be another "habit" at play. They confided that when they did let employees go for that reason, they never confronted them about it . . . no real proof. Even with a camera would be hard to decipher (lots of things are going on with a busy til, during and inbetween transactions. Instead, they'd be let go for some other reason that might not otherwise have been used - or just explained as the owners making staff changes.
I suppose it's possible that's what is going on here, in which case the two mistakes were firing her via facebook and stating the loss of the $10 was the sole reason.
Either way, it's not exactly good press for the image of a cute local cookie shop ;).