Do you have change!!!

Here in Chile, having change is a good thing.

"Change" meaning smallish coins or bills in your pocket. One thing that I still mentally struggle with is that the average Chilean business (which could be anything from my little bread store on the corner to a medium sized store downtown) seemingly is never prepared to give you change when you purchase an item. Chilean coins (the $100 peso coin and the $500 peso coin) and the $1,000- and $2,000-peso bills, are worth more than their proportional value compared to higher-denominated bills.

For some reason it seems like there are not enough of them around, and people do not spend them freely. If I go into an average store to buy an item for $1.500 and hand the cashier a $10.000 bill, he or she will automatically ask me, “¿No tiene más sencillo?” (Don't you have something smaller?) regardless of how many $1.000 and $2,000 bills he or she actually has in the cash register. They give me (the customer) the feeling like I am messing up their personal till. Come on...you're the business, which means you SHOULD be prepared to give out change.

I read once that someone actually had a cab driver accuse them of taking a ride in his taxi just to break a $10.000 bill. And forget about $20.000-peso bills (if you’ve ever actually seen one). I avoid ATMs that dole them out. Tip: if you’re in a bind, a good place to break large bills is the supermarket, the bigger the better. I find myself doing this ALL the time. I'm constantly thinking about making small change for my coin purse. Did I just type "purse"? It's more like a coin "holder".

The Chilean Peso has a somewhat more exciting history than dollars and pounds. For starters, it didn’t even exist until 1975, when it was introduced to replace a highly devalued Escudo. Just in the last 10 or 15 years, there has been all kinds of neat money upgrades, such as the "pink plastic" $2.000-peso bill, now the "purple plastic" $2.000 peso bill, the replacement of the $500-peso bill with a coin, and the two-tone $100-peso coin.

1 Chilean peso = 0.002049 U.S. dollars

1 U.S. Dollar = roughly 480 pesos (this fluctuates daily)

Ever wonder where the U.S.-coin nicknames penny, nickel and dime come from?

Here in Chile, coins and bills have nicknames as well.

• Gamba – 100 pesos
• Quina – 500 pesos
• Luca, lucrecia – 1 thousand pesos
• Gabriela – 5 thousand pesos
• Arturo – 10 thousand pesos
• Palo – 1 million pesos

It’s pretty clear that “Gabriela” and “Arturo” refer to the the historical figures depicted on those bills, Gabriela Mistral and Arturo Prat. Gamba means “prawn” in Chile, and palo means “stick”. Luca is the one of these you really need to know. It can be generally used as "money" (No tengo lucas para la fruta - I don't have money for fruit)

In the next post, we will share about a different kind of change. Our change of ministry location and the process of transitioning to the city of Antofagasta.