"Yeah, well, it's my policy to call for a store manager when a cashier makes up store policy."

what if you're buying just a pack of gum for roughly .89? do you HAVE to give them a dollar bill?

Ugh... For the last time YES, it is legal for stores not to accept change. Is it good policy? Hell, is it likely a policy at all? Not really, no.

When I was in college I worked at an outlet mall very close to the Canadian border. I had a customer buy around $35 in random things and asked me if we took change. I said yes and they pulled out $35 dollars in pennies. The manager and I were beyond pissed. I can understand paying for smaller items in change but $35 in pennies is ridiculous. We had to get penny rolls and count all of the pennies before they could leave. They just did not want to go to the bank and pay the exchange rate before they went home.

I can see why some stores have the policy due to examples like this - but if the item is under $5 it should be fine to pay in change!

Paper currency and coinage are legal tender. However, business can decide if they want to accept it for payment or not.

A business could easily decide that they would only accept the special state quarters from the state you're in for purchases, and they are perfectly within their rights to do so.

You're also perfectly within your rights tell that business to pound sand, and take your business elsewhere.

"Store policy"? I call BS on this. If they have a register, and it has those little areas that can hold change, they're gonna accept change. When you consider the slow economy, this policy (if it even exists) is gonna run Michael's into the ground.

Also, I'm curious: Let's say their "no change" policy is legit. If someone pays $20 for for something that is $17.32 (using random figures here), how is the customer getting his change back when Michael's isn't using change in their transactions?

@SuperiorInky: That was going to be my question too. Do they round down to $17 and they eat the difference or round up to $18 and you eat it?

Back when I was a retail drone, we wouldn't accept more than .99 in unrolled coins, and in the case of rolled coins, we would need your drivers license and telephone number (in case you shorted us.) Now, if you had ten bucks of quarters, no problem (or even dimes.) A ten's worth of pennies, get bent! Just because you have it, doesn't mean we take it. Look at all the gas stations with big-bill restriction. Yes, valid tender, no we don't take it.

@emilymarion333: Exactly. $4 in quarters doesn't take more than an eyeing to count, same with, say, $4 in $1 bills. Anyone bringing in significantly more than that should have them counted and in rolls beforehand..or maybe they can just go to the freakin' bank beforehand if they could.

I've operated a business that goes through lots of coin/cash enough to justify purchasing a bill and coin counter. Worth a mention for small business owners :)

On the other hand, I have lots of money in foreign coins that banks won't exchange and I'm slowly going through the pile exchanging them with friends going on vacation. Frustrating and depressing, since I have a bunch of euros and the US dollar...sigh.

Re: emilymarion333

In Canada it's apparently illegal to use more then 25 pennies when paying for something. You can use other coins (nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies and toonies) but pennies have to number 25 or less.

@freefallmotion:

I'm not 100% sure what our penny policy is, and I'm not suprised if there is a limit on them. I'm sure people would agree that's reasonable as not to slow down checkout lines. You can use a lot of the other denominations though. I've never ever had complaints even passing them rolls of pennies before. Either they just don't care, are very polite, or are trained well.

Does anyone really believe this is store policy? More like BCP (B*tchy Cashier Policy.) You could have asked for a manager and verified if it was true, if not, embarrass the cashiers BCP attitude.

Instead though to save time or not deal with the issue, the OP complied with said demands. Of course that is his choice... but in the end the store/cashier won and every time they get away with this type of treatment, they have no reason to change.

Remember, Best Buy & Circuit City continue to treat their customers like garbage because the customers keep coming back asking for me with a smile and cash in hand.

If I was the cashier, I would have just quickly counted the quarters and be done with it. But if was any higher, I would have informed them of the policy.

As for the YouTube clip on this page, if they left the coins on the table in total disarray, I would bet the waitress would be pissed.

When I worked retail we never would have turned away quarters as we always needed them.

I once had a kid pay with $11 in pennies; this normally would have been refused, but it was a quiet night and I was not the only assistant manager there, so I figured "why not?".

I went back to the office and got the money scale (which thankfully included a rechargeable battery so it could used at the front counter during the holidays), and proceeded to weigh and bag his 1100 pennies into one dollar bags while he waited.

We needed the sale anyway.

@healthdog: Fucking right, no way I would buy some bullshit policy like that. It was QUARTERS! What kind of store doesn't take quarters???

Come on, that's ridiculous. We're talking sixteen quarters.

Maybe the manager was so stupid, she couldn't count that high.

I could understand the store refusing payment if they had to count out four-hundred pennies...that would just waste time and you could see where that might be a purposeful act to waste time and frustrate employees and patrons, but $4 in quarters? Give me a break. Not to mention that many times, stores would KILL to have somebody give them dollar bills and quarters because the cashiers usually run out of those quickly.

Legally, I'm pretty sure a store can refuse or accept anything as payment (I mean, you could, after all, pay in live chickens if the store would accept them), but legal doesn't always equate with sensible.

why on earth would a retail store NOT want to accept change in quarters?

Usually retail stores are always wanting change... because a lot are short of it & they can actually use it!

Like if I went in to buy 20 dollar item with one dollar bills.... they would LOVE it... because they often need a LOT of one dollar bills because they have to make change for people who buy things with tens twenties etc etc.

DOesnt make sense to me.

It sounds like a policy that the cashier interpreted strictly without any leeway for common sense. Everything is so black and white. Like when a grade schooler gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school because the policy says zero tolerance for "knives."

When I had my crappy college job, I had kids come in all the time to pay with change. They'd dump $2.50 on the counter in pennies and give me a little punk-ass smile to go along with it. I would calmly slide 5 paper rolls for the pennies across the counter, and politely offer to help them roll them.

We'd take the pennies, but we'd make them work for it just enough to not try it again.

@Skellbasher:

However I think it is different if you are in a place that provides the product before you pay. Like say at a restaurant/diner... you eat your meal & all you have is 10 bucks in coins to pay.... they MUST accept it or else your meal is free.

If you want to have real fun, go and get a strap of 2.00 bills and pay for everything with them.

@Bog: I fail to see that causing anyone headache, and thus being amusing for the spender. As a cashier, when they come through, I just stick them under the till with the large bills.

This reminds me of one of my bizarre customer service ordeals. When I worked at CVS in high school we had a regular who would buy money orders- usually in the $200-$400 range- with nothing but change and maybe a few crumpled $1 bills. She didn't know how to count, (which wasn't unusual for the area, unfortunately), so she would just give us her sack of change to sort through by ourselves. it took FOREVER to take care of her transaction.

No one behind the counter minded it most of the time. The only issue I had was when she would come in while I was the only cashier on duty. You can probably imagine how thrilled the customers behind her were.

Scenarios like that are the only real reason I can think of for not accepting change transactions, but it's not like 16 quarters are going to take more than a few seconds to count.

I have a theory. Younger cashiers today can't count. It's not being taught in schools like before. I recall on one live journal post a young man in total shock because the cash register at his business was not working properly and *GASP* they expected him to count back the change in his head!

This morning at the McDonalds drive thru, paying for my daughters number one, which they got wrong by the way, I handed the girl two one dollar bills, six quarters, one nickle and four pennies. The girl looked at the change, uncomfortable pause, then she looked at me and asked if it was correct change.

Oh my.

@Bog:

I find the $1 coins really annoy (and sometimes stupify) cashiers.

It sounds like the cashier misinterpreted the store's policy on change. Perhaps they do not accept "rolled change" and she took that to mean "ANY" change?

I can see why they would not take rolled coins, as you could throw metal washers in there as quarters and get away with it if you have a cashier that doesn't open them up. But $4 in quarters is easy to eyeball and doesn't take any more effort than counting a few bills. Silly.

@Kinneas: @freefallmotion: "Legal tender" - cash and coin (even pennies) must be accepted in payment of a debt. Yes, this means you can pay your car loan in pennies and there's nothing the bank can do about it. (I guess what it really means is you loan can't go into default if you've offered the payment in legal tender.) Likewise, a restaurant that takes payment after delivery of food had better be ready to accept coin. (Although I suppose the waitress could warn you before the meal?? Lawyers? Thoughts?)

Where there's no prior agreed debt - our boy at Micheals - they're within their rights to have a VERY DUMB - very very dumb - policy.

That said, the cashier must have been a miserable soul to degrade the kid like that. He was going to make something for his Mom for Zod's sake.

And what cashier in their right mind wouldn't kill for $4 in quarters instead of yelling for someone to bring her a roll of them later in her shift? (I've seen cashiers say "Ooo, can I buy those coins from you?")

That is stupid. I work in retail and as long as the customer isn't significantly holding up the line so what? Honestly in the time it took for her to tell him that they don't accept change she could have had him rung up and out the door.

Now if it was all pennies I'd have made him count it all out first in neat little pile, but I would have accepted it albeit grudgingly.

Sounds to me like the cashier just wanted to be a jerk because she had the ability to do so. I'll bet she got a kick out of embarrassing the customer. Some people are just like that.

Please stop talking about legal tender if you don't know what it means. Or you could read the front of a dollar bill:

THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER
FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

OP, you didn't have a debt so legal tender is irrelevant to this conversation. No store is enjoined by law on what they have to accept as payment. Legally, they are allowed to say "We only accept nickels, Fives, and Fifties" and if you don't like it, tough luck, don't shop there. Also legal: Cash Only, Checks Only, No Change, Change Only, Singles Only (do you think strippers accept quarters?), No Change Given (buses), and finally, No Cash Accepted.

The point of the legal tender law is to make sure that when you owe a debt, the company can't screw you by requiring you to pay it in some crazy way.

According to Wikipedia, if you dine at a restaurant where you pay after you eat, the debt you then owe them after eating the meal does compel them to accept legal tender.

Now without bringing law into it, clearly the cashier or Michaels are being jerks here. Who has a problem counting quarters?? Hell, you need quarters to make change. I'd have been glad to have extra ones if I were the cashier.

@anker: The Safeway grocery store near my house now has pictures of coins on their cash register screens with totals next to them. If I get 32 cents in change, the screen shows the cashier a picture of a quarter with a 1 next to it, a picture of a nickel with a 1 next to it and a picture of a penny with a 2 next to it.

I also notice that cashiers these days have NO CLUE why someone would give a dollar bill and one penny for something that costs $0.96. I've had cashiers give me back my penny because a dollar was enough to cover the cost...

So if this is really corp policy, how long before Michaels goes under in this economy? I'm sure there will be more people dipping into their change drawers.

@SabreDC: Hmm.. I think I found a bug in the comment system. This comment should have been attached to anker's below. Not sure why it jumped up here.

@emilymarion333: One of my friends used to work at a sports store where customers would pay for $100+ purchases in pennies. That would happen about once a month. They would take the change, but check the customer out in the back of the store with a male associate. Why a male associate? The customers that brought in an unreasonable amount of change were usually male and wanted to stare at female associate's boobs while they counted the change.

I can see why a store might have this policy; not because of the inconvenience of counting change, but to protect female associates from dirty old men that go to great lengths to stare at boobs.

@VA_White: So true. When they dig up the remains of 21st-century American civilization, they'll be talking about how the Blind Rule-Follower culture finally destroyed us.

I'm going to take a bit of a different tack here and say that I think this cashier may have just been a douche.

Person is buying a $4 birthday gift for their mother with quarters and their young sister is tagging along. Doesn't that sound like someone in high school? Perhaps I'm wrong, but it does sound like someone young.

What do you want to bet this cashier was 35 - 45, having a bad day, and just wanted to "stick it" to some kid?

And just for the record, there's nothing wrong with being a kid. There's nothing wrong with buying a $4 gift. There's nothing wrong with paying for it in quarters. I just think this was a pissy cashier who showed little (if any) respect to a young person.

@Kickstartheart: You obviously haven't seen all the true stories on the Internet of the idiots who think $2 bills don't exist and call the cops on people for passing them. Sure, at least 99% of people know about them, but that's the top 99%. Guess where the bottom 1% works? I could be wrong, but IIRC it turns out the answer is Taco Bell.

Well, in Japan they can count. You know, here when I go to Chinatown and buy something and the bill is, say, $7.32 and I give them $22.32 they just take it and give me my $15.00. It takes them no time to see what's I'm doing; sometimes as I count out my change they watch and they've got the right bills in their hand before I'm done.

In the USA it's different -- not always, thankfully, we're not Idiocracy yet, but way too often -- when I do that they stare at the money after I've handed it to them and I have to explain why I'm giving them that amount. Sometimes they don't get it until they tap it into the register and the change amount comes up on the screen. Even after that they sometimes look puzzled, like they've just seen an amazing magic trick performed by a master of table magic.

It's scary out there.

@Bog:

You and I are cut from the same cloth. I ask my tellers for all the 2's they have and the dollar coins...they love to be rid of them and it drives other people nuts to get them! Fifty cent pieces irk people as well but are harder to come by unless you ask your bank to order them for you and not all of them will unless you buy the whole box. I don't know what the fed boxes them in so it could be a $250 investment which I am not willing to do. (I know quarters are $500/box, dimes are $250, nickels are $100 and pennies are $25.)

I remember a long time ago a guy wrote in to a local radio station about his ordeal because some dork cashier thought there was no such thing as a 2 dollar bill, he called security on the customer and the security guy looked at the cashier like he was nuts. "Why would anyone fake a $2 bill?" The cashier finally caught on and gave the customer a free pop for his inconvenience.

@homerjay: 100% Wrong homerjay.
They can *ask* you pay with a different type of currency, such as bills, out of courtesy since they are closing in 5 minutes and don't want to count all your change, but no, it is illegal for a store to not accept any form of legal tender, you can pay in all pennies and they can't refuse it.

plenty of times in the last few years i have run into cashiers who couldn't count. i even had a trainee at one job who burst into tears after an hour of me trying to explain to her how to make change from our most common transaction [single ticket cost after tax 33.16. many transactions occurred with the customer putting down 2 x $20's, a quarter and a penny] this was disney and at the time, disney did NOT permit use of calculators and the screen intentionally did NOT show the change amount. you were expected to do it in your head and if you couldn't you didn't get to be a cashier. i have no idea if they still do it that way, but it was a highly effective idiot screening tool. needless to say, she didn't last.

in my former jobs as a cashier i have had to handle a lot of change. fortunately at the disney ticket office we had a currency scale in the back of the office so i could just lay the rolled coins on it and it would tell me if it was short or over. more often than not, it was over, like someone couldn't recall if they counted a dime and stuck another one in anyway.

we had $300+ disney annual passes paid for in change a few times. always had international tourists pay me off all their change so they didn't have to dump it at the airport [the orlando international airport has a bucket for some sort of charity next to the international outgoing security line which profits greatly from tourists emptying their pockets]

working in a hotel i have had more than one college student pre-pay for their room in change, sometimes out of a sock.

it's not mandatory to take it but i never worked anywhere that wouldn't. my old manager at taco bell WOULD make kids paying for their whole meal in pennies get out of the drive through lane and come inside to pay though, to keep from holding up the line.

When I lived in MA, I constantly received Candaian coins from merchants as change for transactions that I used the proper American currency, and always complained about receiving foreign currency, as was basically told "too bad", that's what you're getting.

I moved to San Diego 10 years ago and have never received a peso as change.

I really don't know what my point is though.

@ivanthemute: There is a very good reason for Gas Stations not to take anything over a $50 bill. I see no good reason to deny someone to pay in Quarters. They are easy to count and always usefull. Its not like it was nickels.

I pay for stuff with change all the time at Michael's. When half their stuff is for under dollar, it's ridiculous not to. This cashier was being an asshole. But, from what I've heard from my boyfriend, working at Michael's is a miniature dimension of hell so maybe the cashier was just accepting her role in life as crazy.

@crazylady: hold onto those euros if you are going to europe - it's getting hard to get some exchange places to trade for the american dollar anymore. in amsterdam you now have to do it while still inside the airport or go into an actual bank.

You guys think 35 dollars in change would piss you off? You have no idea, I was in line at Gamestop to buy a game, when some asshat kid bought 400 dollars worth of stuff in change and then ended up being like 3 dollars short! The store let him run next door where his mother was shopping and guess what he brought back? Yeah, another 3 dollars in change. WTF. I should have left but they were the only place in town that had the game and I wouldn't make it back if I left and tried to come back to the store.

@emilymarion333: $35 in pennies is 3500 pennies. That's about a shoe-box full - I know because I just took a half-shoebox full to my credit union and it was $19. You don't just "pull out" a shoe-box full of pennies: they're freakin' heavy!

@forgottenpassword:
They CANNOT tell you to bring in a specific type of quarter.
Legal tender means it has to be accepted everywhere.

Heh, the suckers should just do what reasonable people do and dump the left-over coins in a red-cross or similar gift-box thingy.

At Arlanda airport in stockholm they had one at the gates so that when you finish spending at the airport you could dump your extra swedish kronor in that one instead of thinking about it much.

Works great, must have been several thousand dollars worth in the box and it had been emptied just a week before :)