Here's a quick one. Why in hell has it become standard practice for cashiers everywhere to place bills, receipt and coins all in the same hand? Or, rather, since this is the Opinion section and not the Rhetorical Question section: my opinion is that this practice is both pointless and rude.
I imagine that the idea is to get rid of the customer as fast as possible; the cashier doesn't want to hand you bills, wait around for you to fumble with your wallet, then hand you change, then a receipt. Fair enough. But nobody actually wants all of it in one hand, coins on top of paper, ready to slide off onto the floor; you're not going to jam all of it into the same pocket, generally, unless you really are feeling badgered and rushed. You're just going to stand there sorting it out anyway. Awkwardly, if you have a bag of groceries in one hand, or something.
But then, the convention seems to be, the clerk will be calling for the next customer's stuff, and you'll be nudged away from the counter. In a small shop, you might be on the sidewalk before you have a place to stand still and sort your change out.
Seems to me the obvious place to deal with the change is the counter, and when you walk away from the counter you ought to be free to simply walk away. If the clerk is so anxious to move on to the next in line, there should be a little counterspace right next to the cashier where you can get yourself together. If the management hasn't provided that, it's being awfully inconsiderate to its customers to shoo them away so awkwardly. And yet the cashiers really do insist on it, as though they've been specifically told to use this system--they'll often fuss around for longer than it would have taken for you to organize your change properly, getting it all assembled in one precisely useless package.
The only way I've found to counter it is to get both hands free and snatch the one hand away as soon as the bills are in it. It doesn't work on the ones who assemble the whole tenuous pile first and then hand it over. And I know, all of this is curmudgeonly griping over trivia. But I do think it speaks of something awry in our societal mindset when such a bald discourtesy to customers can become a de facto standard practice for all retail.