Ok, so, go read my post and come on back.

The store I manage has an arcade where you can earn tickets from most of the games. Then you redeem those tickets at the redemption counter for prizes (pretty standard stuff). Recently, the company policy changed about selling these redemption items outright (we were always told not to).

The tricky part is figuring out how much to charge the customer for a random item (there’s a couple hundred). However, there’s a pretty straightforward formula to figure it out - one that never changes. We know that the item costs us $1 for every 250 tickets. So we charge $2. The problem is that…well…things need to be made dead-simple when you’re dealing with a bunch of teenage employees. When things are going crazy and there’s dozens of customers to deal with, I don’t want them doing math in their heads.

I want them to be able to punch in the ticket value on the item, and have a cost get spit out. Yes I could easily do this with an excel spreadsheet, but I need something bullet-proof that can’t get messed up in the middle of a shift and result in a phone call to me at home!

The easiest soltion would be just a calculator and the instruction to “divide by 125.” But yesterday I was told our vacuum was broken and this morning I found a hair tie, a 2” screw, an outlet safety cover, and gum in the brush roller. I’m dealing with developing brains here, folks!