GRRR! I got fired a again (this time over a morgan)

Guys, the bottom line is, it is not the property of the employee, ever. It goes from the client to the company. The employee is simply the pipeline. Nothing in that place belongs to the employee unless he brought it in with him. To recognize that someone is trying to pay with an item worth a lot more than the bill does not give the employee the right to take the item, even if it is exchanged for the proper payment. That item belongs to that company, not the employee, ever.

This is an ethics 101 question folks. There is a right answer and the employees response was not it.

What if you went on line and bought an uncirculated silver morgan of no special pedigree and you receive in the mail some vintage gold coin instead. An ethical person would let the seller know. A person of dubious intergrity would keep the item and a ploitician would quickly order more and hope for the same result.

We are quickly becoming a country of petty crooks. I blame the schools.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

This may be true, but this is a clear cut case of the law having no heart.

Clearly there was no malicious intent on your part, Stainless, but your manager decided to punish you as harshly as he could anyway. If you didn't swap the trade dollar, he may have given you grief at the end of the day for taking "fake" money!

Maybe his panties were in a bunch because you didn't ask him first, who knows... either way, I still say you're better off.

 

ok,

i guess it could be considered stealing...

but im a good person and i wouldn't do this if i thought it was....

the guy gave me a trade dollar.....if i wouldve put it in the register...the company wouldve technally been a dolar short...

so all i did was take the coin worth no currency value and put in a dollar..


all i was really trying to do was help out the guy...and i guess i was making out by keeping this....but i really didnt think it was that big of a deal

im not a cheat or a stealer or a scammer...

 

So all those bank workers that take collectible coins and currency and replace it with their own money (or set it aside for other customers and get some sort of kickback for doing so), how do they fit into all this?

 

Haha. Speak for yourself. And dont blame the schools. Its not thier job to teach morality.

 

It used to be...they called it 'ethics', but that instruction went the way of 'civics' and 'history'....

Today we baby sit and hope for the best.

Just what IS their job?

Enough on that, this is a coin forum, not a social or political one.

The action was wrong, the punishment valid. One does not take what does not belong to one.

 

Amen brother, teaching begins in the home. I personally expect my kids to get their morals, and social skills in the home, and go further in expecting them to be beyond the skills of their peers academically. So for instance my three year old is already reciting the alphabet and reads simple phrases from books etc. She also knows her numbers etc.

The problem is, people relied on the education system to teach their children skills that needed to be taught earlier in life, in the home. And you see the results everyday.

 

I bet alot of folks in here think that is entirely different. Because they are on the receiving end of such transgressions. And Stainless, my apology if I implied you werent a good person. I said you shouldve been up front with your manager. With him being so anal and all. That wouldve been the right thing to do. Maybe what you shouldve done was to grab the bum by the belt and toss him out. all the while shouting,'' he's trying to cheat us!!''.

 

I see you said your "MANAGER" did the firing.

He/She does NOT own the company and make the policy on what is acceptable in the form of currency as payment for services.

My question here is if the "trade dollar" is expected to bring in extra money from it's sale who benefits?

The company or the manager?

Who's to say that the manager does't plan on doing exactly what you had planed for the trade dollar?

That aside, were you given any written or verbal company policy covering such an issue? If not, I'd check with a lawyer if you want to fight to get your job back.

We all have heard stories of cashiers in stores everywhere taking in rare coins and replacing them out of their own pocket and have not been fired for this practice. Yet your situation is different in that you were putting "legal tender" into the till in replacement of something that was not.

Not to forget to mention that there are many chinese counterfeit trade dollars around...COIN WORLD LINK What if the trade dollar turns out to be counterfit?

Will the manager be fired by the company for accepting possible counterfeit non legal tender?

 

Chalk it up for experience, you will not forget or repeat it. Sometimes lessons like these are valuable for one in the long run. I got fired many years ago in some menial job for arguing with one of my co-workers. I learned from the experience and never repeated it. If we all came with a set of instructions and knew what to do, we would never make mistakes or learn from them.

 

I entered school knowing right from wrong. At age five. I think the ethics you mean is business ethics. No 3rd grader had an ethics class.

 

To those of you calling this theft, is making change for someone to use the phone theft ?
Both instances involve exchanging face value for face value.

My opinion is that it is not theft.
Maybe he should have asked the gentleman if he was sure, but no theft.
The business is not missing any of its money that is recorded on the register.
I'd had told him to count my register and compair it to the receipt roll.

If this manager is this bad, I wouldn't want to work for him anyway.
He'd probably scalp you for exchanging a modern quarter for a silver one.
Yeah sure, that'd be theft too. :rolling:

 

as far as this,"it's the companied thing goes"

no it's not.....the coin has no value(spending wise)
so i put in a dollar

besides that......if were gonna bring up company property...

then i should mention that this is the same manager that takes food with out registering it

(for those that dont know, you have to register every food or drink that way the owner know where the food is going)-this is stealing what my manger does....

sorry, but i dont consider what i did to be stealing

 

stainless,

Getting fired from that place may be the best thing that happened to you that day. Sounds like a place that I would not want to work at.

rotobeast makes a good point. (He beat me to it.) Suppose you need some change for the pay phone (if any still exist), juke box, parking meter, etc. Is is a crime to take change out of the till and replace it with an equal amount of currency? As someone else pointed out, the company should primarily be concened with whether the cash in the drawer balances with the receipts.

The Trade Dollar has be demonetized so it is not legal tender. (If it has been remonetized I am not aware of that.) So technically you should not have accepted it but how many non-collectors would know the Trade Dollar is not legal tender? (Most people have never even heard of a Trade Dollar, much less know its history.)

A different scenario would be if a customer wanted to pay for his bill with something other than money (bartering). If he offered to pay for his $5 tab with a Rolex watch worth $2,000 1) it is probably not your decision to accept this form of payment (your manager would have to make that call) and 2) once the watch has been accepted it belongs to the company so you could not ethically (maybe even legally) take the watch and replace it with a $5 bill.

I am siding with stainless on this one. I don't think he did anything wrong and what he did is no different than a bank teller taking a roll of silver halves and putting a $10 bill in the drawer.

stainless, in the future you might want to try to be more discrete when doing something like this. The manage may have only seen you putting the coin in your pocket and missed seeing you put the $1 bill in the drawer. If so, he may have thought you were stealing. It's much better to make that exchange discretely so as to not appear like you are stealing. I probably would have gotten change for a $5 and taken the Trade Dollar and four $1 bills.

You are better of without that job (or so it seems to me).

 

actually, i hated the job, but the economy (at least in Michigan) SUCKS...
its very hard to find a job and i didnt want to quit this one like i did with burger king

 

Once you walk into the workplace, the only things that belong to you are the things in your possession just before opening the door. You have no right to what customers bring in, to accept gifts from customers if your employer prohibits it, or anything else unless there is a federal or state statute requiring the employer to provide it. I'm somewhat amazed by the number of people who don't think that what stainless did was wrong, or suggest he just should have been more sneaky. Maybe it's a sad commentary on our society that so many people can't distinguish right from wrong. Another possibility is that either collecting coins makes one dishonest, or perhaps dishonest people are just attracted to coin collecting. There are threads here all the time about dishonest dealers. And there are other threads by people bragging about how they managed to take a few rolls of silver halves or something from a senior citizen without telling them they were makiing an error. Pats on the back all around for something that should be shameful.

The lesson is to be careful out there. Your friendly neighborhood coin dealer and coin collector can't be trusted.

 

you forgot to add the words flame on

 

Sorry Stainless,

But your dead wrong on this...

It is a company thing. You're inside the company's business and working for the company. Anything that happens on their property is company business and NOT your business to interfere. It is you business to know the company policy, if any, regarding situations such as this and inquire if it is acceptable to accept certain forms of exchange such as foreign currency for example.

You are employed by them and you MUST abide by their rules and regulations regarding what happens on their property and that includes their policy regarding any form of payment they receive from their customers.

The customer did NOT leave the payment for you on the counter or wherever it was tendered, it was left for the company. It is the companies choice what to take in exchange for their services rendered. However, a TIP or GRATUITY, would be another matter altogether if it was explicitly described by the patron. In this scenario described by you this wasn't a tip. The trade dollar belongs to the company and not you or the manager.

If the patron had presented a 2006 $5 OLD MINT Gold coin in payment as part of a $20 check, would it be your right to exchange a $5 bill for that coin?

If the company has an explicit written and or verbal policy stating that currency can be exchanged by employees then it's probably OK otherwise, it is stealing.

Regarding the $5 OLD MINT Gold coin... what if, the patron demanded "CHANGE" at the current price of gold???? Another matter, but the coin and U.S. Government says it's worth only $5!!!

---------------------------------------
SIDE NOTE:
If the manager is stealing food or other items from the company, WHY haven't you or anyone else for that matter reported it to the company?

 

When you get your next job, Stainless, don't use the toilet paper, flush, or wash your hands.
We don't want you stealing paper, soap, or water.
It'd probably be best if you brought your own potty and TP.
Come to think of it, you might want to purchase a SCUBA tank.
You don't want to go sucking up the corporate oxygen.

 

hhahaa i have worked retail ok so maybe thats not really the truth ( is there such a thing as i owned retail) and of course i took stuff out in plain view of all my employees no one had a problem with it. after all it was my money guess it helps if you dont report to other people