Desert View - Day 93 - Three ways to fail.....

5:45 am - Sunday - February 11th - Grand Canyon - 21º F, 44% humidity, wind 6 mph out of the east.....forecast is for sunny to day with a high of 47º F.  Rain and snow coming beginning Monday through Thursday....60% chance Monday, 40% Tuesday, 50% Wednesday an 40% again on Thursday.  It won't be in the 50's again until Saturday at the earliest.

Just as the weather guessers forecast we did have winds here at Desert View on Saturday, and they were in the 20-30 mph range.  Accordingly I bundled up for my 1/2 mile walk to work.  Saturday is always a mixed bag....you never know whether it will be busy, or not.  Based on my cash deposit at the end of my shift I would say it was busy.....$209.01.  With that kind of deposit I was sure TLE's afternoon shift would pull in $4-500 in cash, but she was just a little higher than I, so you could say the foot traffic was consistent all day long.

I began my day by wet mopping the entire retail store once again.  Usually I do not get my first customer until 9:30, or later, but on this day people began coming into the store before 8:30 am.....you just never know.  At any rate, due to the early customers it took me longer than normal to finish mopping.  I spent the rest of my shift serving customers, and in between the customers, straightening the store after each customer incursion.

TLE was right there again at 11:55 am....I can set my watch by her!  She counted in her cash drawer within a few minutes and I was on my way to the back work room to count out my drawer.  How long it takes me to count out my drawer depends on how many people pass through the back room, and how many distractions they create.  On this day there was just Ian, the floor supervisor, and I so it went quickly, and I was dropping my deposit by 12:15 pm.  This has been my on going bugaboo.....at Yellowstone we had a separate, private room  with table and chairs to count out our drawers, but here at Desert View we must do it standing up in the workroom on a little cart......not very conducive to accuracy.  Nonetheless, I have become pretty adept at counting out my drawer, but sometimes it takes me closer to 30 minutes as there are so many things to interrupt your train of thought.....namely counting accurately the multiple denominations (100's, 50's, 20's, 10's, 5's, 1's, quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies).

There is one more thing that is strikingly different from Yellowstone.  There we only had to count out $300 (our bank), and everything else was deposited.  We did not have to add up our deposit, as it was going to be counted by the folks in accounting anyway.  Our only responsibility was to count, accurately, to 300.  We did not have to record anything except that we began and ended our shift with $300.  We didn't have to account for how many 20's we had, or 10's, or 5's, etc.  Then at the beginning of our next shift we accessed our bank and decided what denominations we needed to buy for the new shift.  It was so simple.

Here at the Grand Canyon we must count all the money in our cash drawer at the beginning of the shift to be sure we have $400 and that the number of each denomination agrees with the end of the prior day, then at the end of the shift we have to record how much money we have, how much of each denomination there is.  Then we subtract our bank ($400 here) from the total and that is our deposit.  Then we must accurately deduct our deposit from each denomination and then once again record the exact amount of each denomination that makes up our $400 bank at the end of the shift.  Why they do it this way I don't know, but essentially the practice here gives each employee three ways to fail.....you can be wrong on your starting number, wrong on the total cash at the end of your shift, and wrong on the final bank count.  In Yellowstone I could count out consistently in 10 minutes....here it takes 15-30 minutes, sometimes longer.  In Yellowstone there are 14, or 15 stores and the simplied system they employ works well, but here at the Grand Canyon where there are 4, or 5 stores they employ a much more complicated system.  Like TLE says, "they're going to count it all again, so why do we to count it too?".

I was home by 12:35, and watching the Winter Olympics a few minutes later.....there was the biathlon, short track speed skating, snow boarding, figure skating, and ski jumping.  Eventually I migrated out to the trailer to ride my stationary bike for 35 minutes whilst still watching the Winter Olympics, and that was pretty much my afternoon.  TLE was home by 5:20, and by 6 pm she was serving minestrone soup accompanied by a nice salad.  We watched the Olympics until I headed off to bed at 9:30 pm.....TLE stayed up (she gets to sleep in) reading for a while.

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