An Honest Cashier
Betsy Taylor
During our open season (May 1 – Oct 31), I work at the National Road/Zane Grey Museum, where I cashier two days a week. Before working there, I’d never even stood on the sales side of the cash register. Although I was intimately acquainted with the workings of a calculator through the process of figuring student grades, a machine that managed money was a mystery to me. I hoped that the cash register was smarter than I am.
A cash register is a machine. If it’s in working order, only the law of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) applies. Today’s cash registers do most of the work. If you press the right keys, the buyer and cashier can both see the amount of purchase, the amount tendered, and the assigned amount of sales tax on a small screen. Then it spits out the items’ total cost. The customer hands over money and the register reveals the amount of change. Finally, the only thing the cashier must do is count the correct change. Simple. No questions.
At the end of the day, the cash register even reveals how much money was collected and the amount of sales tax paid. Again, the only thing the cashier must do is count the money in the register and be certain that amount balances with the machine’s total. The whole process makes selling and rendering money to the employer transparent.
But imagine a time during the 1870s before the invention of the keep-you-honest computer on the counter when clerks and bartenders could easily withdraw handfuls of currency from cash drawers. Even if they kept a running paper tally of money transacted, the amounts could be falsified, and nobody could prove maleficence. Suspicion aside, many business owners had given up keeping track of what their businesses earned.
One business owner, James Ritty, who owed the Empire Saloon in Dayton, realized that that he was being swindled by his sales staff. His saloon boasted a huge number of daily customers, but the revenue didn’t support the income he should have realized. Ritty was aware of machines that could count regular occurrences like the number of revolutions of a wheel. He had an idea that a machine could be constructed to count the number of money transactions during a day. So, he turned to his brother, John who was a mechanic. The two went through a series of experiments until they applied for and received a patent in 1879. The road to a workable product was long with so many trials and bumps that the brothers could easily have given up. But in 1880 they had developed a working cash register and decided to manufacture the machine full-time. They set up a factory above the saloon and managed both businesses for a time until they realized that juggling both concerns was impossible. In 1881, they sold the cash register factory to an investment group. The group improved the register’s mechanism and developed it until it approximated the device with which we are familiar today. Along the way the investment group evolved into today’s National Cash Register Company.
Over time, cash registers became ornate. Etched tiers including drawers and window frames that display merchandise costs, amounts tendered, and amounts of change became works of art. Manufacturers outdid each other as they varied sizes along with sophisticated carvings ranging from Romanesque to Art Deco.
While cash registers are currently found in nearly every business establishment, credit card machines as small as a smart phone equipped with a card reader can replace them. Small business owners who accept only credit/debit cards swipe the card through a reader and immediately email a reciept to the customer’s phone. The transaction is completed with no need to physically transfer money. Future generations may see cash registers become as obsolete as the abacus. Then the only way to see these marvelous machines will be to visit them in a museum like Dayton’s History Carillon Historical Park.
