money troubles

On Thursday morning, I was hired at Sunrise Mart and went in for my first day of training that night. Sunrise Mart is a quaint, authentic Japanese market nestled on the second story of an old building in St. Mark’s Place that I had been frequenting since I discovered it some weeks before.

My first day of work was nerve wracking, but incredibly fun. I enjoyed ringing up groceries and politely conversing with customers in both English and Japanese. One thing I noticed was that, more often than not, the customers wanted to give exact change. Rather than hurrying to pay for their groceries, it seemed much more important to get rid of those pesky coins weighing down pockets and purses. I remembered that this had been the trend in Japan as well and coin purses of every style imaginable could be found.

I remember having a huge amount of trouble giving exact change in Japan. It is so easy for me to add up our quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies into correct amounts so that I get nothing but nice crisp bills in return. In Japan, I just couldn’t do it. Something that seems almost second nature to me in the United States was quite a time-consuming task in Japan. At some stores, my friend would simply lose patience and take my coin purse from me, putting the accurate coins down, while I stood by blushing. On the other hand, when I had a Japanese foreign exchange student live with me, she ended up with almost fifteen dollars in coins because she did not want to embarrass herself by taking so long to count out change in stores.

At one point, one of my Japanese customers was fishing through his coin purse for coins. After fussing with the coins for about a minute, he thrust his wallet into my hand and said, “you do it”. I could not help laughing as I began counting out his coins, saying, “it’s okay, in Japan, I had the same problem”. Feeling less embarrassed, he smiled and remarked “no matter where you are, money is hard, isn’t it?”

Isn’t that the truth?