Working the counter at Buzzy’s Country Store this past holiday weekend I set out to do a study of how people pay for their transactions. I came up with some payment categories of cash, money clips, wallets, purses, clutches etc. and started off trying to keep track of how folks paid. My intent was to end up with some numbers and percentages and go from there conclusion-wise.
However, somewhere along the line I got busy and it became too much of a hassle to track it all so precisely and I said to heck with it. Also, I found that folks pay in so many different manners that it’s tough to categorize all of them.
But while I don’t have any “hard” data, I did find some patterns of pay behavior that tended to confirm what I have noted thru the years as follows.
1. The majority of the time whenever a camping, touristy, Peggy’s-people kind of couple come to the counter to pay, it is usually the lady who pays. (The exception to this observation – biker couples in which case the dude always pays. I don’t know if that’s because there is some biker’s etiquette that says when she’s got her arms and legs wrapped around you and breasts shoved in your back, you pay or if it’s just because women travel light when on a motorcycle. Regardless, biker dude pays.)
As the lady pays, I will always tease the couple and ask the dude “Where do you find women like this?” Answers vary from “She makes more money than I do” to “It’s my money, I just let her hold it.” (That last reply always makes me think of a Buzzyism “Never let someone else manage your money for you.”)
2. Women will usually pay from a clutch, change purse, valise whatever you call it. But the older the woman, the more likely it is that she will have a purse from which she pulls out her clutch. In general women are more organized, neater and as a result a little easier to deal with when taking their money and making change for them. Women are also more likely to give you exact change, I guess because they have that change purse thing going for them.
3. Guys are all over the place when it comes to how they pay. Some just have cash, some have money clips, some have card case combinations, some small wallets or some may just have a simple credit card that they slip out of and back into their pockets. The worst guys to deal with are those who have their cash all wadded up and crinkly and you almost hate to handle it because you’re not sure where they have had it hidden on themselves.
4. As with older women having purses however, older dudes are more apt to have wallets and big fat ones at that. Sometimes their wallet is so jammed with stuff that it takes them forever to find their money. I have to restrain myself from saying “If you’d just clean that thing out once in a awhile, it wouldn’t take you forever to find your money!”
Whenever I see a dude with a fat wallet though I am always reminded of the following:
While at the retreat house in Faulkner, Maryland, several years ago, the head Jesuit addressed us about making a donation to them and their work. He started off by saying that the medical profession had documented a new back disorder known as “Fat Wallet Syndrome” and that it negatively impacted one’s back by putting too much pressure on the siatica nerve. His goal then was to provide us some back relief by lightening our wallets for us.
I thought that that was a pretty clever way for him to have handled the “give us money” portion of the retreat. I also thought that he was making it up. However, I have since learned that the Fat Wallet Syndrome business has some medical truth to it (click here.)
So, the next time you are in line at a store waiting to pay for something, just watch how folks in front of you pay for their items and you’ll see what I mean about how varied the modes of payment are.