Working Experience: Cashier

 

Assalamualaikum all,

This time project, ellya wants to share with you ellya's experience working from after SPM and after graduating with a Diploma. The first job that ellya got and did was as a cashier at a supermarket in Malaysia. The place is kept secret okay. The job of being a cashier seems easy, but in fact, it is very trivial.

This picture is an infographic from the whole story. It becomes less and compact if you want to read the short want.

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Be the cashier, main responsible is billing and collecting payment in cash, check, and cards, tending change if any, and issuing receipts. Furthermore, it also needs to maintain cash registers, check on the available stock, assess the merchandise for its quality and assist in bagging of the purchased items. 

Not just that, this work needs to capable of processing transactions, understanding buyers' needs and giving appropriate advice, and maintaining cash drawers. Adept at performing price checks through electronic scanning, bagging items, and answering customers' questions. Scanning bar codes of products by using an electronic system for billing. 

Besides that, this work must greet customers, informing about discount and offers, and assisting to bag the shopped items as well as thanking them for the visit. Lastly, handled cash register to keep count on daily transactions, and assisted in monthly sales reports for presenting it to senior management. An issue that ellya's have is supermarket cashiers do more than just ring up and bag groceries.

Cashiers face numerous challenges each day at work including long hours of standing, work shifts that constantly fluctuate, a large volume of customers, relatively low pay, and surveillance by customers and their employers. In addition to these challenges cashiers sometimes face mistreatment by customers. Such mistreatment can come in many different varieties and cashiers have developed several emotion work strategies to help overcome them cashiers primarily face three types of emotional challenges when dealing customers. These are stigma, verbal abuses, and sexualized mistreatments.

Stigma was reported most often as an overall failure of the customer to value the cashier as a human being and as low status, uneducated, unintelligent and without ambition in accordance with existing cultural stereotypes. Verbal abuses were most often reported to be the use of profanity and rudeness by customers. Sexualized mistreatments were usually reported as either requests for dates, crude remarks with a sexual tone, and customers grabbing, pinching or hugging cashiers. All cashiers who participated in this study had experienced at least one type of these challenges, with verbal abuses and lack of respect (stigma) being the ones most often reported. In sum, there was little difference among the number of reported incidents by age group.

To respond and overcome these challenges, I recommend cashiers must develop emotion management skills, or a series of strategies. The data show that cashiers in my study utilized two types of emotion management skills, interpersonal and personal strategies. Interpersonal strategies at work consist primarily of peer support, which allows the cashier to both assist herself and others based on the experiences they share. At times, cashiers also enlist the managers for support. In these instances, cashiers seek not only immediate support when mistreatment incidents occur, but also seek advice based upon the manager’s own experiences dealing with these situations. 

Personal strategies consist of cashiers “acting professionally” and “forgiving the customer”. Acting professionally consists of surface and deep acting skills first described in order to fulfil service work expectations, which includes friendly smile, cheerfulness, and subservient demeanour. Here, cashiers described things like “psyching themselves up” for the day’s events and utilizing differing vocal inflections and body language to suppress negative emotion in order to maintain a cheerful disposition. Cashiers also identified “forgiving the customer” as an effective strategy to reduce the likelihood of personal insult or injury. In these cases, cashiers reported that they blamed the customers’ bad behaviour not on the customer themselves, yet on outside influences that have caused these actions. 

The cashier can be described as the face of the store, providing one-on-one personal service in a mostly self-service retail establishment. During a typical eight-hour shift, I may interact with well over a hundred customers of all demographic categories, each with the expectation of having full attention and dutiful submission.

For over whole, this work is very good because it teaches ellya how to communicate with people in the right way. Not only that, it also fosters a spirit of cooperation within the team to help each other.

Thank You Friends For Read My Chit Chat 😁😁