Keep the change. Well not if it is your entire salary.
The Baoying Car and Transport Company in China paid 200 of its employees in the lowest denomination of 1 yuan coins. A yuan equals 15 cents in USD, and the employees were paid heavy salaries in the literal sense; hundreds of dollars in coins.
The Yangzhou-based company cleared 200,000 yuan coins that equal about $29,010, in bundles of hundred. The chair of employees’ union, Gu Fengyun said that the company had collected the coins in the rush during the spring festival.
An anonymous company employee while talking to Jiangsu China said, “Well, coins may also be money, but people get their pay transferred into the bank. It wasn’t very convenient.”
A more sensible solution would have been to bank the coins, but since that would require a lot of workforce and specialized equipment, the company stored all 500,000 yuan coins in a warehouse. Even if they decided to bank the coins, it would have been a huge time-consuming mess. The bank staff is required to count, pack, and disinfect the coins. “It’s not like they could just come in and dump them here, we still have to count the coins. Every time we receive coins, it’s like a war,” said the bank staff.
The company faced a backlash from the employees and ended up deciding that the employees could return the coins.
Currency might just go obsolete with the increasing trend of paying through cards and smartphones. Just in 2016, over 347 million people in China paid for goods using their phones. This might just be a good time to get over coins. We end up dropping lots of those on the sidewalk anyway.
So in this particular case, please keep the change, we would take notes.