Shortchanged #2

Back in the day, when dinosaurs did indeed roam the earth, if you worked as a cashier in a retail location of any sort, you needed to know how to make change...cash registers didn't yet have the option of punching in the amount tendered. Whether it was a grocery store, gas station, coffee shop, you needed to be able to ring up the sale and mentally do the arithmetic to make change if necessary.

All this changed many years ago, when McDonald's became one of the first chains to put in cash registers that had the +/- feature that enabled salespeople to just hit the button and calculate the change, thereby insuring that neither the store nor the customer was shortchanged.

I have a few clients that pay me in cash rather than by check, and so sometimes I'll make purchases using actual greenbacks. Twice in the last few weeks I've received less change that I was supposed to get, coincidentally each time from a butcher, different stores each time. Each time it was a difference in coins, receiving 25 cents instead of 75 cents, or something like that. The amounts aren't large, but I'm wondering if, each time, it was a conscious mistake, just carelessness, or something else.

And each time I said nothing...I wonder what that says about me in these situations.