Apparently, real doesn’t always recognize real.
A yogurt shop boss has ripped into his Gen Z cashiers for failing to distinguish between real and counterfeit bills.
The Florida-based assistant manager, who goes by Sam, detailed this financial “false” alarm in a Reddit post that’s going viral, Newsweek reported.
The frustrated fro-yo boss uploaded a pic of legit legal tender that his teen clerks had confiscated and labeled “counterfeit,” adding that he “shed a tear because of the sharpie they scrawled onto the bills.”
The photos show bonafide — if decades-old — $5 and $10 bills, which were marked “fake” and “do not accept” in bold letters, effectively rendering them useless.
Sam said he had to explain to the young cashiers that the banknotes weren’t bootleg, just “old.”
He explained that the bills are “pre-1999 as far as dating goes, so at least 25 to 30 years old” — meaning they’re older than the clerks themselves. Sam most notably pointed out a $5 note from the 1960s.
The manager said that, in retrospect, he should’ve shown the young cashiers the variety of bills people might use as they’ve undergone several makeovers in the past three decades.
This wasn’t the only account of new cashiers suffering from counterfeit illiteracy.
In the Reddit comments, one shopper recalled a clerk snatching their $100 bill and writing on it in marker.
“Took a closer look, it was from 1950, very crisp and good condition; not fake,” they wrote. “From what I could tell, it’d be worth $200 if not for that cashier scribbling all over it.”
Another said they were flagged for a $2 bill, only for the exasperated manager to come over and explain that it was real, just “not very common.”
However, Sam empathized with the confused clerks given that they’d grown up in an age of cashless transactions, noting that he rarely uses physical bills.
“It’s a digital world nowadays,” Sam declared.
In addition, many zoomers actively avoid carrying cash.
A 2024 Talker Research poll found that almost 30% make sure they don’t have greenbacks on them out of fear they could be jacked, Newsweek reported. Meanwhile, another 33% of Gen Z respondents feared they could accidentally lose physical bills.
Interestingly, the same study found that Gen Z tends to carry more cash on average — $81.60, than their baby boomer brethren, who tend to tote just $47.70 on average.
Meanwhile, a 2023 study by Credit Karma found that a staggering 69% of Gen Z used cash far more than the year prior — surpassing both Gen X (47%) and baby boomers (37%)
The findings showed a rise in “cash stuffing” — a budgeting method in which people divide their money into categorized envelopes — by zoomers learning how to manage their cold hard cash.