[tyingq]

I think it's more like "have to record the sale and produce a receipt". The customer wants their penny, so you have to ring it up.

Now if you steal a dollar, your totals at the end of the day are off a dollar.

But, if you take the dollar with no recorded sale, your counts are good.

[gruez]

But OP's comment also says

>Back then, most registers didn’t print receipts.

[tyingq]

Registers that keep track of how much should be in the till, based on the day's sales, those have been around quite a long time. NCR got big enough in 1912 that they had antitrust trouble. Their big selling feature was tracking the till.

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/economics/pdf/marvel/ncr.pdf