Library management demands employee print receipts for every book checkout, causing massive lines in the library and a dispute with the city office: ‘The fallout was immediate'

Working at a register in any workplace environment can be a stressful experience. Anyone who has had a job standing behind the counter can share moments where the line would just get longer, and customers get more and more impatient, and working through that becomes more and more difficult.

One of the most annoying scenarios that can happen to an employee working the register is a malfunction that they cannot fix. The cash drawer is stuck, the screen is frozen, or the receipt printer ran out of ink. It can be a 30-second fix, but it can also cause an actual holdup that leads to a huge line. And who are the customers going to blame for the issue? The person behind the counter. They don't care what is causing the holdup; they just want to get checked out and go home.

When the library employee in the story below was told that a new policy states that they must give printed receipts to every checkout, they knew this could only lead to a stressful experience like the one described above. Unfortunately, there was not much they could do about it. If management wants them to print everything, that is what they will have to do.

It wasn't long before this new policy led to chaos in the library. One guy checked out 47 items, which forced the employee to print out two full pages of receipts, and by noon, it was clear that the printer was not handling the extra workload very well. When the line in the library got so long that everything was overflowing, the employee knew it wasn't their fault, but it was still an annoying position to be in. They could only hope that the fallout would convince management that their new policy was bad news, and that things were working perfectly fine the way they were before.

They were correct. The same day, the city office got involved to understand why people were complaining about the service in the library, which led management to take back their demands and restore things to the original state.

Sometimes, the best way to show someone how bad their idea is, is by simply following through with it…

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The memo said we must give a printed receipt for EVERY library checkout, so I did, until we ran out of paper

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