Recently I hired a professional cleaning company to clean my home. We agreed on the price of $79. They only take cash.
So they came and cleaned and then it was time for them to get paid and leave. I handed them a $100 bill expecting $21 in change back. They said they don’t have any change at all. I only had a $100 and a $50 so I could either overpay them by $21 or underpay them by $29. They didn’t do a particularly good job at cleaning so I didn’t want to leave a $21 tip this time.
Eventually I found some coins and managed to pay them $73 and they left angrily.
It seems to me like if your business only accepts cash then you ought to have change. Yet they acted like it is my responsibility to have exact change. Which is it?
If they expect exact change, that needs to be stated upfront. When we had delivery drivers that we allowed to accept payment for catering drops, it was put in writing on our invoices that drivers carried no change.
I am generally sympathetic to having limited change on hand because so few people pay in cash today that register’s don’t ebb-and-flow through the day anymore. A $100 dropped on a less-than-$20 total can require the register to be manually restocked which isn’t always feasible for many small businesses. We routinely do less than $100 in cash sales against ~$2500 in daily transactions; cash is almost a nuisance at this point to keep stocked for sometimes literally just 3 or 4 people a day.