So I work at Walmart. (pause for expressions of sympathy and/or derision) Yesterday, a guy came in with his girlfriend, and they bought ~$50 worth of stuff and took it to the Lawn and Garden Center, where I work. So he then proceeds to buy a prepaid card which he wants to load with $500. Okay. Then he pulls out a wad of cash, and proceeds to pay for his ~$550 worth with small bills. He had $50 in tens, a couple hundred in fives, and $200 in two dollar bills! And so I had to sit there and count the bills, and then put in the amount and the cash register prompted that I needed a Customer Service Manager to approve the transaction.
Wheee! That means notifying the front and then waiting 30 minutes for someone to get around to it. (OK, it wasn’t 30 minutes, but maybe 10.) Meanwhile a line has formed. My coworker came over and we sorted out the line on the second register, and my coworker counted the bills to confirm the correct amount. Finally a CSM showed up and I think she also counted the bills and then approved the transaction.
The reason he paid ~$550 in small bills - someone paid him that way and he wanted to get rid of the small bills and just put them on a card. Hey doofus, go to a bank. That’s what they’re for - exchanging large volumes of cash. Not the Lawn and Garden Center cashier.
Oh well, at least I had plenty of change later when a guy wanted to know the largest amount of cash he could get, I told him $100, so he proceeded to make a second transaction for a pack of gum and another $80. Some days I don’t have that much cash in the register. Hey doofus, That’s what a Bank is for! Lawn and Garden is not an ATM. Yes, you can get cash back, but really, be sensible. Go to a Bank!
Let’s have a little sympathy. You think it’s easy for an overweight, middle-age exotic dancer?
(Our knees hurt all the time, we have to tell our mums we’re going to the office at 10pm, and people judge us for our stacks of twos and fives… well, I’ve said too much already)
Probably this, but I know there is a good number of people who just plain won’t go to banks at all. One person I know, who has a legitimate job, won’t use banks and cashes her pay check at Walmart. The place my son used to work offered employees the choice of receiving their pay via some sort of prepaid card.
When I was driving a taxi I had cash like that every day. I would deposit it from time to time in an ATM, but you know some people want to avoid the service charges on a checking account, or maybe just can’t get one at the moment. When your account is overdrawn, the banks tell each other about it and it prevents you from opening a new account.
But yeah, someone in that position probably shouldn’t be buying stuff in the garden-lawn department.
I would appreciate a store saying “This’ll take two managers and tie up an entire department for quite some time. Do some shopping for ten minutes, and we’ll get a cashier off their break and gather the managers, and there’ll be a register up front opened just for this transaction. You don’t want to hold up all these good people, do you? Next!”
I do wish that the “Customer’s Always Right” trope had never started. As a customer, I’m rarely right…
I always use the checkout at the Lawn & Garden of Walmart because it’s usually not as busy as the main checkouts. I purposely park near that section and enter and exit through those doors.
There are a lot of people who don’t bank for a variety of reasons. Just Google “Why don’t people use banks?” TMGHTM (Too many Google hits to mention - I just made that up!)
A common one is fees for holding a low balance. Who wants to stick their few dollars in a bank if they are just going to take it away through fees?
That much in $2 bills sounds quite odd. I can imagine it might have come from someone who stashed them for years as good luck. The customer could have acquired them quite legitimately, say a relative died and they were in their home. Of course, it could also be from someone stealing the stash from an elderly relative or coming across the stash while doing work in someone’s home.
I actually did have someone staying with me that did this, I had a container that had some $2 bills, a bunch of change, and a mishmash of foreign currency. I guess the guy was addicted to alcohol as he went to a bank to convert the coins into bills to get a couple of drinks.
Of course, one other alternative is that he works at a bar that gives the $2 bills out in change as a novelty, to increase tips. I haven’t seen this in a few years, with most places taking cards now.
It’s much easier to withdrawal cash from an ATM than deposit it. First, many ATMs physically cannot take in deposits, they don’t have the necessary hardware (deposit slot & storage space).
Second, if you do find an ATM that takes deposits, you either need an account at that bank or your bank needs to have an agreement with that bank to take deposits. If you bank at one of the national banks you probably won’t have much of an issue; however, if you use a smaller, community bank or a credit union good luck making a deposit at a, say, BoA ATM machine.
My first thought with this particular customer (before “under the table cash”) was “Well he just can’t get to his bank.”
My bank happens to be a credit union (only one branch) and it’s open from 8:30 to 4:45. If I want to go there I need to take time away from work. Obviously I could use the ATM to deposit any time night or day but even still, that’s a half hour trip across town and back when I could just convert it to a prepaid card at Wal Mart.
There ARE a myriad of reasons why people don’t use banks too like **Icarus **says. But even if you do have a bank and use it (like I do!) it’s just not always the easiest option.
How is exchanging small bills for larger ones at a bank going on the grid? I’ve never been asked for ID or even if I have an account when I’ve done it. Oddly though when I take in my change jar they do ask if I have an account.
You would think. But I take large sums of them off people from time to time. Before someone get’s booked their belongings are inventoried including their cash. It gets counted in front of them and then they are asked to sign a receipt. Every now and then I’ll have a guy with a huge wad of twos. When I ask them WTF they never have a coherent answer about. Mostly because they’re shitfaced.
In Portland, that many two dollar bills is the mark of a strip club enthusiast. Stripper chow is customary at the two dollar level and ATMs in many clubs are set up to give nothing but two dollar bills.
I guess I can see how strip clubs, which I assume are all cash, would use the $2 bill as change to help the women get better tips. I’ve see that in a few bars, back when prices were lower and more people paid in cash. Order a $3 beer and get a $2 back in change, forcing you to tip the $2 rather than the $1 you would normally for a bottle of beer.
Banks can be strict about dealing with non customers, especially in this day of anti-money laundering. I work for a financial services firm, never deal with customers or money, and yet I’m still forced to take endless anti-money laundering education. I can see a bank teller using the ‘it just doesn’t seem right’ to refuse to convert a large amount of small bills to larger ones. Of course, that will depend on the city. In Chicago, most banks won’t even sell a roll of quarters to a non customer.
Still, a prepaid card seems kinda odd. I know I got scammed by a former friend who claimed he was stranded and he had me buy some stupid prepaid card and read him the numbers on it rather than a bank wire. I have no idea how he used the prepaid card numbers to buy his meth, but he did.
The potentially informative thing about this thread is that this is unusual enough at Walmart for a worker there to comment on it, and not AFAICS any other employee contradicting it. That’s somewhat surprising to me.
Otherwise, 7-8% (per FDIC’s annual survey in recent years) of US households don’t have bank accounts. A much higher % of our tenants don’t in the particular area we rent, although no, they don’t pay the rent with $2 bills. As others mentioned banks don’t have as inconvenient hours as they used to but not as convenient as Walmart (one I went to in MI recently, I rarely shop there when at home in NJ, was open 24 hours). Also it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable for somebody to think Walmart, while making a presumably profitable sale on the $50 items and while also generally offering the service of debit/gift cards paid for with cash, would be just as obligated to do this as a bank where you did have an account. You could argue that one, but it’s not an insane position to take IMO.
So where the 2’s came from is a little weird. Otherwise I don’t see what is. And somebody is probably going to get stuck behind this guy in a teller line if that’s where he goes. Based on my experience with ATM’s eating checks occasionally if I put a bunch in (even under the limit they say) I wouldn’t try to deposit a big number of bills in an ATM even if says it can do it.