Ways to Annoy your Grocery Clerk #31 – Fake Money Joke

Way to get them! I wouldn’t be able to just stand there and listen to the same old shit without responding.

They really only push us to check 50′s and 100′s at my store, and it’s surprising how many people crack jokes, but also get kinda offended when they see a cashier holding one of their bills up to the lights. I’ve gotten the “I just made that today!” and “If it’s fake, I got it from the bank. Call them.” comments quite a few times.

Big bills are great because they are space savers but I hate using them. If I take $200 or more out of my ATM I’m certain to get a 50 or a 100 in the mix. No one really wants to break them but grocery stores and gas stations seem well-prepared to do that. I can’t blame you guys for checking, you’re just covering your butts.

I used to hate dealing with the same joke as a convenience store clerk. I would love to fuck with the people. My regulars loved it too…they would even get in on the jokes.

I remember the old fake money joke, I used to hear it all the time when i was working at a store where the majority of the patrons when I was there during the daytime were the elderly. There’s something about the elderly that make them really love that fake money joke, i think it was because there were probably a lot more common and much larger scale money scams in the past. I’ve calmed down on my annoyance for repetitive jokes because I’ve recently found myself on the other end of the spectrum, having a handful of jokes or clever, made up catch phrases that I’ll use on different customers, that I could end up using several times a day if the appropriate situation arrises. My current most popular one is “Express is a state of mind, not an amount of items”. It’s usually a hit.

I’ve heard that one so many times too. But at the place I used to work we had special markers that we used to check if a bill was real. We usually only did it with large bills, but if someone made that joke, I made a point out of unsmilingly checking all their bills with the marker.

I hear that one at least once a day at my register, as well. So unfunny. I’ve even had people ask if coins were “real” when they are dirty or old and stained. The most common thing I hear is when I have troubling getting an item to scan, after a few tries, is “Oh boy…that means it’s FREEEEE!” I usually type in the UPC and then deadpan “No, it’s $4.98.” (or whatever the price is). I wonder if people really think saying that it going to net them a free item??

I never realized how many times you hear the same thing repeated every single day! I can imagine all the things that go through your mind!

Perhaps, since some grocery stores now use computer screens to display your purchase, you could program it to scroll all the jokes you have already heard and tell the customers that every extra telling of the joke ads 1% to their bill.

Just a thought.

I work in a cinema and we have a stock set of bad customer jokes. One of the most annoying is ‘Where would you like to sit today?’ ‘In a seat, hur, hur.’ This was not funny the first time we heard it, and we hear it at least 7 times a day per person. Those of us who have gotten utterly sick of it have started putting people in the front row, after all, it’s what you asked for…

Then there’s the ‘In the best seat’ response. What? What do you like? I like being towards the front, most of you like being up the back. DEFINE! This is the point of asking you the question, you utter berk!

And the wave of 3D has seen another lovely little ‘joke’ arise. A bit of background, our cinema runs Dolby Digital which means that we have the polarised glasses. Since we are outside the states we get charged anywhere between $40 to $100 for a single replacement pair. For the record, it’s not funny when you point to the bin and say ‘Is that where we put these, hur, hur.’

I hate that joke, here in Canada for whatever reason people pay with $50/$100 bills at McDonalds a lot (apparently no where else takes them) we have to have a manager check them and type in a code for us and honest to god over 80% of the time the customer will say “I made that fresh just this morning!” and kill themselves laughing and me and my manager will just go heh heh uh yeah.