Making Change

Getting short changed in Italy is commonly accepted

One of the first annoying things I discovered about Italy is every cashier's extreme reluctance to break a 20. I was in Rome on a class trip, and on the first day our professors took us around to some of the museums. Naturally, having just arrived, we did not have an abundance of loose change. Each of us had whatever the ATM machines had given us, predominately 20s and 50s.

The entrance fee at the museum was 7 euro, and as the first of my classmates stepped forward with a 20 euro note held out the cashier looked down at it with a grimace.

"Don't you have anything smaller?" She asked.

The student explained about the ATM, and she grudgingly took the 20 with a sigh, "Do you at least have 2 euro to make it an even 15 in change?"

Again the student explained that we had only just arrived, and hadn't had time to accumulate any coins.

At this point the cashier seemed to realize that we were all together as a class, and asked if any of us could change the 20 instead. To her chagrin all 14 of us held up 20 euro notes as well.

Rolling her eyes with frustration she opened her till, and after a brief glance at her supply glared up at us all and announced that we needed to have exactly 7 euro, she couldn't make change for all of us.

After a brief pause of awkward silence, we simply went into the gift shop, thinking surely a shop would have plenty of change on hand. We thought wrong. With an identical grimace that cashier also snubbed our 20s and sent us back out to the main desk.

In the end we finally convinced her to let us in by pooling the ticket price into one large sum and exchanging several IOU's amongst ourselves, but all the same she counted out our change as though each coin was being painfully ripped from her hands.

To me, it was simply bizarre. We were in Rome, in a popular museum frequently visited by tourists, at the beginning of the work day, and none of the registers had been stocked with change? It didn't make sense. I had worked in a tourist shop for several summers in the states, and the first thing we did every morning was stock every register with about 500 dollars worth of small bills and coins.

This concept is unheard of in Italy. To this day I have yet to find a shop that will willingly give out change. It seems that store owners rarely stock their registers. They merely make due with whatever accumulates in them according to what customers pay with. This means that each and every cashier in Italy is in constant fear of running out of change as soon as they get a streak of customers with nothing but 20 euro notes.

So unless you have the foresight to arrive in Italy with your pockets full of small change, you will need to learn The Three Laws of Register:

1. If the whole numbers on the receipt are at the lower end of 5 euro segments (i.e. 1 euro, 6 euro, 11 euro, 16 euro, etc.) the customer is almost always asked to provide the extra 1 or 2 euro so that the change given back can be in whole notes rather than 3-4 euro coins.
2. If the cents portion of your receipt exceeds 60 cents, you are usually fine, though they may ask if you have 10 cents so they can give you back a 50 cent piece. If, however, the number is lower than 50 cents and you can't provide the exact change, then you will more than likely get a nasty look for forcing them to part with so many of their precious coins at once.
3. If the cents portion of your receipt does not end with 5 or 0, and you do not have exact change, then the total cost of your purchase will be rounded up to the nearest 5 cents. When absolutely necessary they might even round down, but I believe the term "blue moon" should give you an idea of how rare that is. As for the 1 and 2 cent coins; there have been occasional sightings, but for the most part they are fading into legend.