'Did I mess up by jokingly ringing up a transaction for $28 million at work?' UPDATED
"Did I mess up by jokingly ringing up a transaction for $28 million at work?"
I work at a liquor store, and it being the 26th of December, it was relatively very slow today. Near the end of my shift, me and a coworker had nothing much to do, so I jokingly scanned a miniature bottle of alcohol several times as if he was a customer purchasing that many bottles.
To keep the joke going, I then scanned an entire box of pre-made shooters (something like 40 shooters at $3 each), several times once again. The total was something like $2,500 at this point.
My coworker then has the bright idea to check the system and find some expensive wines that were sold and are still in the system, and finds one worth several thousands of dollars (almost $10k), and sets the quantity in the POS to 999 (the maximum allowed).
By this point, the running total is ~$9 MILLION, and we’re cracking up (we were extremely bored). He then finds ANOTHER bottle, this one nearly $20k, and sets the quantity to 999, bringing the total up to ~$28 MILLION.
Now, this is where I’m personally responsible for the f&^% up; I pretended to bring the transaction up to the point right up to when you confirm how much the customer is paying in cash (it automatically assumes the customer is paying in full, and the only thing stopping the transaction from going through was single press of the “Enter” key).
My coworker didn’t see that I was already there, and mistakenly pressed “Enter” to reach the same point I had brought us to.
$28,000,000 in theoretical cash made its way into the cash register’s balance.
I yelled at my coworker to ask WTF he did and he realized what he had done and his eyes went wide.
We immediately tried to reverse the entire transaction, but (understandably), there’s a $1 million maximum that you can return at a time, so attempting to return $28,000,000 of “sold” alcohol didn’t work. After figuring out the maximum, I then had to do dozens of returns each worth $1 million at a time until every single bottle of alcohol was “returned”, and the inventory was corrected from -999 to 0.
However, in the reports for that day, it’ll show $28 million in revenue and a similar amount in returns, which will completely mess up stats and graphs and everything, which higher-ups will obviously inquire about.
I’m going to go wait for my store manager tomorrow morning before she comes in so that I can explain what happened and confess that we were joking around and never meant to go through with the transaction. Please pray for me and my job (I 100% accept that we are at fault and deserve some sort of punishment for exaggerating as much as we did, and for not working when we were supposed to).
Here's what people had to say to OP:
Should've called the manager right away. Best to be proactive with mistakes than react to them flipping out. The manager might be able to call certain people to let them know it was a mistake, instead of the numbers showing up in reports.
JediJacob04 OP:
Yeah in hindsight I should’ve, but the manager was someone from another store replacing the usual manager who’s on extended sick leave and I wouldn’t have known how to call her after she had left. But I’m hoping going to see her before we open tomorrow will be proactive enough
Yeah. Definitely be as proactive as possible. Preventing problems is ALWAYS easier than fixing it.
Easiest solution would’ve been to find a broom and sweep the floor instead of messing around with the barcode scanner :,)
I've got a say. This story is awful dumb, but you're owning up to it all and that's admiral. Would have been easy to throw them under the bus. Hoping for the best! Maybe you can keep your job and this can be a laughable thing pretty soon.
you wouldnt be the first or last, but it may be your last day.
accounts/finance/payroll can just void the transaction my guy.
JediJacob04 OP:
I’m sure they can, it’s just an incredibly stupid amount of money to joke around with. $10k would’ve been an exaggerated amount on its own, but $28 million?? That’s how much the store makes in 2 years. We were just stupid and I’m ashamed for it
28 million is actually much better than 10k. It is an obvious incorrect transaction. It is immediately recognizable as an error where 10k voided could easily be theft, fraud, embezzlement, etc.
Yeah realistically what’d they do for payment? Drop off the Federal Reserve out front? lol
JediJacob04 OP:
Lmao, the funny thing is if the customer paid in $100 bills, it’d take something like 38 hours to count all of the bills (assuming 2 bills counted per second). It’s obviously a stupid mistake, and it’s not as bad as if I had “returned” unsold bottles for $28 million (though I don’t think it’s possible to initiate a cash reimbursement for more than what’s in the register)
Wait, I just realized. How were you even able to enter 999 bottles into the transaction if you don't have that many in the store??
JediJacob04 OP:
The system doesn’t care, and it’s usually a good thing because sometimes inventory is off by a few bottles or even a case, and in that case our inventory just goes to the negatives instead of blocking the transaction and holding up the line. The POS system and the inventory system are different, so I imagine the POS systems just sends “hey, we sold x
To be honest in this case it would probably be easier to let management know BEFORE trying to correct the mistake. There is probably a way easier way to correct it behind the scenes then you have access too.
JediJacob04 OP:
I’m sure there was, but I figured if they could correct the initial one they’d also be able to correct the corrections I made to the inventory. I just panicked (and the manager had left for the day earlier)
28 million is immensely better than if it was $50, $100, or $500 dollars because it's obviously an error and not suspicious.
JediJacob04 OP:
Especially in cash. It’d take 38 hours to count that many $100 bills if I counted at 2 bills per second. I get that it’s better than $1,000, but I might as well have stopped at $1 million… or $100k… or just $0.
And a training item will be added to the new employee orientation that will make new hires say "who did that, that they have to warn us not to do it?"
JediJacob04 OP:
My boss told me a memo would be sent to every single store saying not to do this… the amount of employees who will think “which dumb^%$did that??” will be astronomical
Later OP came back with this update:
My boss was understandably frustrated and disappointed but the worst that can happen is the higher ups will meet and they’ll probably decide to give us warnings/it’ll be in our files, but nothing more.