The bane of my existence is trying to break a 100 peso bill. Taxi drivers suddenly wish they had pushed you out into oncoming traffic when you had them a 100 peso bill. Cashiers go squeamish at the sight of one. They'd honestly rather not sell you anything than give you their change. What makes the situation even more maddening is that ATM machines only spit out denominations of 100s.
Coins are even harder to come by than a 20 peso bill; we've already been warned by a local to guard any coins we get a hold of with our lives. Her words exactly: "Don't use them, put them away and hide them." There's a coin crisis going on!
The bus system in Buenos Aires is comprehensive and the main source of transportation for many, millions rely upon it. However, to ride the bus you need to put 80 centavos into a machine on the bus, coins only, no paper bills accepted. So what people used to do was go to the bus companies with a 100 peso bill and change it into 100 pesos worth of coins. Then the bus companies started charging 12 pesos for this particular service and shortly thereafter people started noticing that coins were becoming harder and harder to come by. Last year authorities found gigantic drums in the basements of the bus companies full of millions of dollars in coins. The bus companies had been hoarding all the coins that had been paid to them through their machines, thus propagating the coin crisis, leading more people to change their bills with them and therefore pay them an extra 12 pesos to give them all their money anyway.
My favorite part of this story is that people now know that the crisis was started through hoarding, and yet their solution is to hoard the coins themselves. There's something so undeniably charming about that.
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