There should be signs posted around the city with the faces of Manuel Belgrano and Juan Manuel de Rosas on it, with ‘WANTED’ written beneath in big black letters. One of my coworkers was complaining today about how nobody in the city seems to want to break a 100-peso bill, and there was an article in ‘La Nación’ newspaper about the lack of 10’s and 20’s, so obviously I thought about ripping off the idea and writing a post about it.
It seems that many ‘cajero automáticos’ are only giving out 50’s and 100’s, but as most porteños know, these are really hard to break; you’ll probably have to end up like my coworker going into a supermarket and buying some random shit you don’t need just to get the change, or wait for a couple of hours queuing at a bank if your local ‘supermercado’ happens to be closed. The problem seems to be mostly in the ‘micro-centro’, but reading the comments posted in the ‘La Nación’ article you get the idea that this is common even outside downtown, and is a growing concern for many.
According to the article, the biggest losers are those people who benefit from social programs. It gives the example of this guy who was supposed to receive 700 pesos, so off he went happily to the nearest ‘cajero automáticos’, probably whistling and skipping, only to realize he couldn’t get the total amount out. Why? Because he got charged for some retarded concept called SDO.ULT.RES (I have no idea what this is), that charged him 2.18 pesos to take the money out. And since the ‘cajero’ only had 100 and 50 peso bills, if my calculations are correct, and I am no Math genious since I failed my Math IB exam, he was only able to get out 650. And, if this guy really is some sorry bum in desperate need of the 700, 50 pesos must be a big loss for him. And the poor dude couldn’t get the cash from a bank teller due to regulation imposed by the bank and ‘gobierno porteño’. Rip off much? I’m guessing the guy’s smile was wiped off his face when he realized this.
But I don’t think people such as this dude who receive benefits are the only ones affected by the lack of smaller bills; everyday citizens wishing to get cash out are screwed as well. Try going to a ‘kiosco’ or getting a taxi and paying with the purple face of Julio Roca. The ‘kiosco’ man will probably smile and ask ‘¿no tenes mas chico?’ but the taxi driver will probably be pissed off, and many taxis even have little signs in them saying they won’t accept these bills. Everyone is desperate to hang onto their 10’s and 20’s, and, like my coworker asked, ‘doesn’t the country realize how much money is being lost by refusing to accept 100’s?’. It was all very hard-working-American of him, but I reminded him that we Argentinos aren’t really bothered that much about hard work and shit like that. But it’s a fair question: how much money is being lost to production and the economy everyday all around the city? If everyone accepted 100 peso bills, which the ‘cajeros’ seem insistent on spewing out, we’d probably be spending a lot more every day, and help with this little problem we’re dealing with here in the land of the ‘choripan’ I like to call ‘inflación’. God knows I’m not an economist, and I probably slept my way through the one year of Economics I did in high school, but I was a History student, and one of the things we learned about was the Great Depression, and how the Weimar government was trying to get people to spend more to fight the decreasing value of their currency, a lesson that seems almost as relevant to ‘Contemporary Economics’ as to ‘Germany in the early 30’s’.
One of the comments in the newspaper’s online article was that the 10’s and 20’s are being hoarded up in the ‘casa presidencial’ and ‘la casa rosada’, which is the ‘pink house’, also known as the ‘white house’s gay younger brother’, and if so we should all march there and demand the release of Belgrano and Rosas! Obviously I’m kidding, and that comment was (I hope) a joke, or the product of a delusional person with conspiracy issues, but on the other hand it would not surprise me if the Empress of Evil, Cristina, was actually sitting on piles of 10’s and 20’s laughing at the chaos she was creating outside her window, a grin plastered on her she-gremlin face (seriously, write ‘greta the gremlin’ in the google image search, you’d think they were separated at birth or something, the resemblance is truly uncanny).
So yeah, where the hell are the 10’s and 20’s? Well… fuck if I know! But we definitely need them for people to stop being so annoying and accept the 100 bills.
To the ‘wachos’ and ‘wachas’ who won’t accept the big bills
El Pendejo Porteño
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