Do You Have Any Change?

Italians are odd when it comes to money. Once you get outside of Rome nearly all transactions are conducted in cash. But Italians seem to have a love-hate relationship with cash. They hate small change. For instance, restaurants price everything in either whole or half euros. All prices listed ALWAYS include all taxes which makes it significantly easier for them to do. Nearly every transaction is rounded to the nearest 10 cents unless you are in a major store or the tiniest of Mom and Pop operations. They still play the game where cheese will be prices at 12.99 euros per kilo, but when the price for the piece you chose comes out to 6.67 euros they will often ring it up as 6.60 or even 6.50 thus avoiding those pesky 1, 2 and 5 cent coins.

Then there are euro bills. The smallest bill in circulation is 5 euros, coins go all the way up to 2 euros. If your bill is 4.37 and you hand them a 5 euro bill, they will ask if you have change. In other words, they want you to give them 40 cents so that they can give you a single euro coin in return. If you were to hand them a 50 euro bill for the same purchase they might flat out tell you they couldn’t make change, even if they could, hoping that you would hand them a smaller bill or even pay for it with coins. Recently I paid for a 65 euro grocery purchase with a 100 euro bill. The cashier asked if I had anything smaller so I opened my wallet and showed her there was absolutely nothing else in it. I actually had other bills, I had simply removed them from my wallet for exactly that reason. The subsequent rolling of eyes, drawn out sighs, shuffling of bills and close inspection of every square centimeter of the bill which ensued was worthy of an Oscar. After literally two minutes she finally gave me the 35 euros in change. You would have thought I was asking her to give me the money out of her own pocket and taking it away from the starving orphans of the world instead of getting change when I had already GIVEN her 100 euros.

In order to reduce the pain of the “one hundred euro shuffle”, Amy and I went to a bank to have them break all of the large bills we had brought with us. This too was an interesting exercise. They won’t help you unless you have an account and you can’t have an account unless you are a legal resident. You can’t exchange currency either, unless you have an account. These measures are part of a rigorous anti-drug campaign by the Italian government. We got around that by going through the bank where the school does its business. They were quite helpful and we managed to exchange all of our large bills for smaller things which we might have a prayer of using. The bank itself was a trip. In order to enter the bank, you need to go through a revolving entrance chamber one at a time. You push a button, the teller responds by activating the exterior door. You step in, the door closes behind you and you are then inside a sealed chamber where you wait until a second door is opened so that you can enter the bank. It wouldn’t surprise me if all of the glass involved was bullet proof. For a transaction as large as the one we were making, the actual cash had to be sent through a central system to the cashier. Perhaps Springfield could cut down on the number of random bank robberies if they adopted the “Italian way” of banking. Finally, we have been told that there is a 20 euro bill crisis. ATM’s now dispense only 20 euro bills, creating a shortage of them. How curious; they are, after all, printed paper.