KZBlog

One of the few areas where shopping in Kazakhstan varies dramatically from shopping in the US is in the attitude towards coins and change. Practically every time I try to buy anything from a store, they ask if I have exact change.*

Now, people don’t generally use amounts less than 5 tenge, even though 1 and 2 tenge coins exist. Instead we use matchbooks and candies (and once, at the drugstore, a hemoglobin bar). So, very often if you are buying something for 67 tenge and you give them 100 tenge, they hand you, not your 33 tenge change, but 30 tenge and a book of matches.

It’s really cool if you have a gas stove, because you need the matches anyway. And a box of matches often costs more than the change. In fact, once I bought something and didn’t have exact change. So they handed me a book of matches as the equivalent of 2 tenge. It reminded me that we were out of matches at home, and it might be good to bring home another box. So I asked how much another box would be. 4 tenge, they said! Having only 10 tenge in coins left, I ended up taking home another 3 boxes of matches: 4 boxes in total for 12 tenge.

But the ultimate moment for me was the other day at the cafeteria. Now this cafeteria always wants coins. They ask for exact change every time, huff and puff if you don’t have it, and once extracted from me 200 in coins, instead of bills; she practically grabbed the coins out of my hand when she saw them. The other day, I went and had some odd total—326 tenge, call it. The cashier sucked in her breath when she saw my 500 tenge note.

“Oh, don’t you have exact change?”
“Sorry, I don’t have any coins.”
“Oh, please check. Maybe you do.”
“Sorry I have exactly 3 tenge. Look.”
“Oh, oh. Is that all your change?”
“Yes, it’s all my change!”
“Well, ok.”

She proceeded to open the cabinet behind her, revealing bags and bags of change!

I recently had the chance to contrast this with American attitudes when I returned to the US—because one is always afraid that one has forgotten what it was like back home. The one time I was asked for exact change was when the cashier literally didn’t have the change, and had to overpay me by ten cents, giving me a quarter instead of 15 cents change

I invite foreigners and Kazakhstani—and especially Kazakhstani who have been to the US—to comment on this, give me your stories. Am I missing something here? Are we the crazy ones?

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* one irrelevant linguistic note. In Russian, the phrase “Do you have 6 tenge?” would transliterate as “Will there be 6 tenge?” And I am always tempted to answer, “Well somewhere, sometime there will be!”