I don't normally carry large bills with me, but I had bought something for a friend, and he paid me back with a $50-bill this weekend. Today at lunch, I went to a convenience store, and I purchased a full tank of gas, a sandwich, a bag of chips, a Snapple iced tea, and a pack of cigarettes. Total bill: $42.73. What transpires is one of the best examples of human stupidity I have encountered in a long time. This is almost as bad as the woman who believed her doctor could fix her back if she had sex with him. I hand the cashier the $50-bill and this exchange takes place:

Cashier: I can't accept this.
Me: Why not?
C: We don't take bills larger than a 20.
M: Why not?
C: Because as a convenience store we don't have a lot of money in our cash drawers so giving out large amounts of change means we would seriously deplete the amount of small bills we have.
M: But my tab is $42.73.
C: I'm sorry sir, but we can't accept that bill.
M: If I bought something that cost $2.73, would I be allowed to pay with a $10-bill?
C: Yes.
M: Well, this is basically the same thing. Either way, I'd be getting $7.27 change, and you certainly have that much change to give me.
C: I'm sorry sir, but it's store policy.
M: But the purpose of that rule is so someone doesn't come in a buy a pack of gum and pay with a $50-bill. It's not for when someone buys over $40 worth of stuff.
C: I'm sorry sir, but it's STORE POLICY.
M: If I had two $20-bills, and one $10-bill, would I be able to pay with that?
C: Yes.
M: Then what's the difference? You'd still be giving me $7.27, and you'd still have an additional $50 worth of big bills in the cash drawer.
C: Sir, it's store policy, and if you continue to be a nuisance, I'll call the manager and have you thrown out of the store!

Luckily for me, the man behind me saw this exchange take place and offered to break the $50 bill for me. (Ironically for two $20s and one $10.) I then proceeded to hand the money to the cashier, who provided me with $7.27 change and placed my purchase in a bag. As she handed the bag to me:

C: Thank you for shopping with us, and come again.
M: You're a f***ing moron.

Yeah that is pretty stupid. Around here they often refuse to accept $50s due to fear of counterfeit money. Personally, if I was counterfeiting money, I would never think of making fake $50s - why would you make a denomination that almost no one uses and thus is highly visible. Given that the bank machines pump out mostly $20s that seems to be the logical bill to counterfeit.

Actually, in the US, the most conterfeited bill, believe it or not, is the $1-bill. It's design is the only one that hasn't been changed recently, using the same design for the past 50+ years, it doesn't have a water-mark, or a security band in it, and thus, is the easiest bill to counterfeit.

What a stupidity! I think the cashier should be thrown out of the store.

It's the same thing overhere, noone accepts the 100 and 200 € bills. If i do my groceryshopping in a supermarket, and i have to pay, let's say 92,50 in total, they won't accept a 100€ bill. They will take two 50's, but not the 100. :rolleyes:

Every friday it's the same story with me and my boss when he pays me my week's salary. He always wants to drop his 200's and 100's on me, but i always refuse and make him go to the bank to get me smaller bills, since i can't do anything with them. The only one who would accept the larger bills is the local dopedealer. :shake:

I don't think we have such bill problems in Poland. The only one is that when all customers pay with high bills the cashier has nothing in cash drawer to give the change.

Wow Pac man. The grocery store one is really shocking. Most of the bigger grocery stores have so much money changing hands that I don't think they's have any problems breaking a 100. (We don't have $200-bills in the U.S.).

All I was asking for was common sense there. Yes, if you're being a prick, and you want to buy something that costs $1, and want to pay with a $50, then the cashier has every right to tell you to go blow. Put in my case, I was paying with the smallest single bill that would cover my tab.

I wish that in addition to the $50, I had three $20s in my wallet. I then could have handed her $60 total, and she would have had to give me MORE change than had she accepted the $50.

I remember this happening to us when we went down to the USA, at a McDonalds. They wouldn't accept our $50 bill for a ~$10 lunch. Fortunately we were in Las Vegas so breaking bills wasn't a problem... but still inconvenient.

It's quite obvious the entire "can't give change" thing was a sham. The real reason she didn't accept the $50 bill was fear of counterfeit. Though it does make me wonder why she didn't just say it out loud in the first place. A decade or so ago the dollar was frequently used in Lebanon, and some places would refuse $100 bills because they were being counterfeited at the time. But no one every gave such a stupid excuse as not wanting to hand out change.

I guess she is a moron after all :)

What a ****ing moron. I was able to pass a $100 bill in the convenience store near where I live. :D

*EDIT* After the dumb cashier checked it under a blacklight for 15 minutes...

[ October 18, 2005, 06:13: Message edited by: Disciple of The Watch ]

My dad once stopped at McDonalds for breakfast on his way home from the recycling yard. All he had was $100 bills. The manager took care of this, and he got his breakfast...

Ahhh ... the memories. I remember some of the good ol' days when I worked in the car wash. It was the easiest shut down at night for a cashier that you could possibly imagine. Dust the place off, hit a few switches, hit the alarm and leave. One of the cashiers still couldn't figure this out. Half the time she'd forget to hit one, some or even all of the switches.

So one night, I had to fill in as full-serve at the gas bar (combined operation). A guy walks up to me. He opened the rear door that allows cars to drive into the car wash, but now he can't get himself back out. He started to clue in that something wasn't right when all the lights were out and nobody was around. The culprit is of course that the cashier forgot to hit one of four switches at the end of her shift. Apparently this was the 20th or some time that an incident like this happened on her watch. The other, much smarter cashier, had to come in and bail the poor guy out. The manager called the dense cashier the next morning about the incident. She has the sauce to tell the manager, "Yeah whatever, as if I f***** care!!!" So naturally, the next sentence in the dialogue is, "You're fired!"

The next morning, the car wash staff were dancing in the staff room and whipping the towels around. :D

[ October 18, 2005, 13:49: Message edited by: Beren ]

There is one really easy way to test this to see if it really is an issue of counterfeit bills or the giving of change. Next time I purchase gas at that convenience store, intead of buying a pack of cigarettes, I'll buy an entire carton. The cost of a full tank of gas and a carton of cigarettes would almost certainly exceed $50. Heck, the carton alone should be about $35, and it definitely costs me more than $15 to fill up my tank. I will then attempt to pay cash, using the $50 and other small denominations. Since they can't claim a change issue (as the cost of the purchase exceeds the bill I'm paying with) we can determine if in fact the rule is in place to stop counterfeiting.

The only problem is, the guy behind the counter wouldn't know anyway, and wouldn't care either, considering it's store policy and he's not there to question it, just to enforce it. So the only way you'll achieve anything will be by talking about it to the manager.

i work in a convinience store, as a cashier, and i accept every ammount of change i am givin and we have a ABSOLUTE minumum of 4000 DKKR=Danish kroner(400EURO), and many times, roday for example, i had about 20000 DKKR(2000EURO) this is alot but i have tried worse, the biggest bill we have i denmark, i think is 1000 DKKR(100EURO) and they're seen very commonly, i accept many a day

and i must admit i have never encountered a proplem getting or giving change, but DAMN i laughed of your story, the last line is GENIOUS!


oh and btw. i live in DENMARK it's in scandinavia, and scandinavia is a "region" in Europe, so everybody understand, i think

Oh yes, Aldeth. A good example of human stupidity indeed. Now, a few points to consider...

A. The cashier is lowest rung in the store hierarchy, who certainly cannot circumvent the STORE POLICY for a single customer who comes in and tries to stick a fifty in their face. It's not their business why the manager decided not to take bills over $20, but if they do take those bills, they get fired. Now, trust me, nobody wants to get fired from their job for your benefit.

B. You choose to insult the cashier despite the fact that they do their best to be polite with you, which in lieu of your attitude is a feat in itself. It takes a lot of patience to work in customer service and deal with every pompous fool who just doesn't seem to understand the two simple English words - "STORE POLICY". You have a problem with the policy? Shop elsewhere. Nobody is going to cry a river about it.

C. Finally, instead of thinking over the accident and making a conclusion that you need an attitude adjustment and maybe just a bit of common sense to make an elementary connection between your demands and the fact that a cashier is clearly not the person who can meet them under any circumstances, you decide to post about your experiences on a message board. Not only you do that, but you manage to try and pass yourself off as the wronged party, and you proudly inform us of your ability to call people names in justification of your own reasonable deficiency. How heroic of you.

So, speaking of examples of human lack of basic insight which should exist in anyone aged over 12 to ensure their survival in the real world, you make a solid case in my book.


- edited as per request of the management

[ October 19, 2005, 01:23: Message edited by: catbert ]

I'm sorry Aldeth but I'm going to have to agree with Catbert here. Allthough I would not put it quite as bluntly.

I also work part-time as a cashier at a badminton hall and the crap I have to take about all sorts of unnecessary thing is absolutely astonishing. Also there are several rules around which are just company policy and for the average customer they may seem completely useless. Such as the fact that we have these "excercise coupongues(sp?)" which different companies give buy and give out for their workers. Now in certain days we don't accept these as currency and that obviously is something the customers have a hard time understanding. The truth is of course that the company that makes the coupongues takes half of the profit and we only get the second half and therefore on busy days accepting them would be just horrible buisness since we would not get the full profit. Until recently I did not know myself why it was company policy so I decided to ask the boss and she explained it to me, so that I'd have a more satsifying answer for the customers next time they asked.

Anyway I'm sure you had just a bad day and did not quite understand the situation from the lack of expirience or something. I'm sure that you generally are not a difficult person to deal with.

well... after reading the last to post, i see that you are right, in NETTO, the convinience store i work in, also part time, we have certain company poicies, but those do not involve the customers i think, in any ways ican imagin that is.

but the costumers i "service" sometimes GOD! people can really be VERY annoying, and your incident aldeth is NOTHING, i might post a thread or examples later.

:rolleyes: I can see why catbert doesn't visit the boards much. Aldeth isn't stupid, he's a foppish idiot; it's right in the name. And just because it's store policy doesn't mean it shouldn't be challenged (or even changed, for that matter). If noone questioned stupid rules, there would be no such things as fashion trends or democracies.

After being rejected for the 50, I would have pulled out a $1000 bill and tried to pay with that, just to be a jackass.

You know, I have never once encountered a place that refused to take $50 bills.

As a former cashier at a convenience store, I must point out a glaring error on everyone's part.

Store Policy of not accepting a higher denomination of bill, such as a $50, is not due *soley* to confederacy. It also includes *robbery*, especially during the evening and overnight shifts.

In the gas station where I worked years ago, it was part of the training to make 'drops' in the safe if the cash register ever held more than $50. Most of the time, I made at minimum three drops per night.

Although I do find it very stupid for my manager to change a $100 or $50 for Joe Blow from the Factory to pay for his 10 cent refill coffee, yet I got reamed for accepting *at night* a $50 from a woman buying a case of beer, a soda pop and a pack of diapers which added up to $48. :rolleyes:

So basically, Cashiers can catch hell for using common sense if this violates store policy. To Quote Yakov Smirnov: What a Country...

Wow...

And to think it's perfectly acceptable to pay for a couple cans of beans and a smoke for $5 with a $100 bill here. At a gas station, no less.

(I've seen this happen. No, I don't smoke, my uncle bought it)

Concider this angle: if they allow people to pay with large bills, they might be afraid to run out of change for customers. I mean, if people only pay with 50 dollar bills, they might not have the change for someone who buys something for <$10 for example.

they would just go out in the safe where they have loads of change..

@ Catbert and (to a lesser extent) Morgoroth:

Other than the last comment to the cashier, I don't think I did anything rude or insulting. I was merely asking questions that would help me to better understand why the policy was in place. The explanation given (lack of change) didn't make any sense as my purchase did not require them to give me a large amount of change.

The only reason that I made that final rude comment to her was because she threatened to have me thrown out of the store for committing the horrendous crime as asking some questions. So really it was her that got rude to me first. That's what really ticked me off - I wasn't angry at all up to the point - confused about the situation is more like it.

Throughout my high school and college days I worked at a retail store, and it is true that sometimes you get difficult customers. If I was in her predicament, the way I would have handled it (instead of threatening the customer) would be to say, "Sir, there's nothing more that I can tell you. Let me get my manager and perhaps he can better address your concerns."

I think in this incident as told by Aldeth getting the manager would be the appropriate response. Aldeth was lucky that the man behind him could and would change the $50. The gas was in the car. What would the store employees do? Siphon out the gas? The manager should be able to okay the the purchase and payment.

You're probably right there. Me myself don't have the luxury of getting the manager since taking care of the place is a one person job. Anyhow it really depends if there was a long line behind you or not. If the guy behind you was the only guy waiting then it's understandable but if there are like ten persons behind you then I'm pretty sure that the manager advises his employees to tell a troublesome customer to piss off, since quite frankly one customer ain't worth the trouble of keeping the line waiting. This of course also depends on the size of store etc. But yeah under normal circumstances getting the manager would be the best option. Still I think you were a bit too rude and your last comment was definently unnecessary. If you really wanted to deal with the manager you could have asked the cashier to get him.

I admit that my last comment was rude, but that was said out of anger and frustration. Not that being angry and frustrated justifies it in any way, but I feel if the cashier had remained civil with me, I would not have spoken rudely to her.

Quite often, sarcasm, or other speech inflections do not come across well in written text. In case it was unclear in my initial post, I was not being sarcastic, talking down to, or otherwise insulting the cashier. The comments I made were civil in tone, and it was her who quickly became agitated. That is why I don't understand why people think I was rude prior to my final comment, which admittedly was unnecessary.

Who knows? Perhaps she caught me on a bad day (I don't think so, but maybe), or to turn it around, maybe I caught her on a bad day. The bottom line is she violated the golden rule of all retail/service related professions: The customer is always right. If there is a disagreement between an employee and a customer, the options of the employee are limited to getting a manager, or offering a different solution to the problem. Threatening or getting hostile with the customer is surely not an advisable way of doing good business.

Ha! Having served six years in a convenience store, I'm used to the idiocy being on the other side of the counter. The number of self-righteous dickheads I had to be courteous to is exceptionally high, and typically the problem is on the purchasing side of the register. This person you've struck, Aldeth... well, all I can do is second that by saying "Congratulations - you are a ****ing moron!"

Much like kuemper, I can understand the no-$50s policy if you were in a service station that was frequently robbed; having been there and experienced that, I can say it's a good policy to make generally known (although I don't believe it's as helpful as actually making the site secure). Regular cash drops are a necessity when your cash register is overflowing with high-denomination bills - in my experience, that was an excess of $200 AUD.

But seriously - when you only have to give back a fiver and change, WTF is going on? It's pulling a Chewbacca Defence for store policy. I can't imagine it's an utterly unwavering policy which even the employees and regular customers are subjected to, irrespective of circumstances.

A bit of common sense doesn't hurt; unless the guy behind the current customer is packing a shotgun and waiting in line, you'll have time to safe-drop the cash before he's holding you up. If your boss is that much of a prick that they'll fire you for being practical, you're better off at another store, and you can sue the crap out of them for it to boot. If they're not actually present, well, if their policy is unreasonable, I see no reason to follow it.

@ Nakia: At the stores I worked at, we requested other methods of payment, or wrote out an I.O.U-style note complete with personal information (including license number) and asked for something of value as collateral, and got them to come back within a few days to pay. If they didn't agree to that, we called the police to report a drive-off.

And on a less serious note...

Worst example of a blatantly bill-breaking customer I ever encountered was a guy (in a suit, of course - he had the manner of a self-important knob) who bought one litre of milk (about $1.50) with $50. I thought, okay, maybe he only has the $50, no problem. This guy completes the sale, then goes back to the fridge, pulls another litre of milk, returns to the counter, and pulls out another $50. In not so many words, I told him to get stuffed and pay with the coins I'd just given him.

Obviously, I can understand that keeping tons of money in the cash drawer is asking for a robbery. However, it's not like this was in a section of town where crime was high, and also it wasn't at a time of day where you were likely to get robbed either. (As I said, it was on my lunch break, so it was right around noon.)

Plus, this was a fairly large convenience store, complete with a deli where you could buy a sandwich (which I did). There were people coming in and out of that store constantly. Unless they were doing cash drops every half hour, it is quite likely that they have a great many 20s in the register at any given time. I don't see the difference to having a whole bunch of 20s or a little bit fewer 20s but more 50s - either bill is rather unsuitable for giving change.

EDIT: Just got back from that same convenience store, in which I purchased gas and a carton of cigarettes - total bill - $65.53. I previously went to the bank to get a $50 to retest this theory. (I'm going grocery shopping this weekend, so even if they didn't take the $50, I knew I could use it this weekend). So anyway, it was a different cashier, and I handed the guy a $50-bill and a $20-bill. He took them both, no questions asked, and gave me $4.47 back.

Unfortunately, this doesn't do much to answer the question. It is perhaps that the cashier didn't know the no-50s rule. Or, perhaps it's OK to pay using a 50 if you're buying more than $50 worth of stuff. If it was strictly a counterfeit issue, it wouldn't matter the monetary value of your purchase. I don't like the no big bills in case you get robbed theory either, because regardless of what denominations you accept, the amount of money in your register is going to be more dependent upon when was the last time you did a cash drop, and not what the denominations are. If you've processed $200 worth of transactions since your last cash drop, it doesn't matter whether the cash transactions were all $1s, or two $100-bills - you have the same monetary value in the register.

[ October 20, 2005, 16:28: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]