Reminds me of when I worked at Loblaws in a neighbourhood without much access to banking and credit, and I’d usually lift anywhere from 1-2k from each till when I started the deposits midday.

20k in till drawers is a terrifying amount of money to have easy access to 😬

Holy shit

I mean I get that, but why don’t they cash those at a big store or even get one of those refillable debit card things, it just seems safer. Especially because often if you tell them they’re only going to get 5’s and 1’s back they somehow miraculously pull out a card/smaller bill. I know in the past i had a shift tell me to just give them their order without taking the big bill, so I’m often skeptical if they aren’t just hoping that will happen.

Right? Like almost any fast food place I’ve ever been to has signs saying they don’t accept over $20 bills, why should Starbucks be any different. Especially with Starbucks having so many options to pay, credit card, mobile wallet, Starbucks app, like do you really not have any other way to break that large bill?

I mean I get the logic of thinking they would want bigger bills, but also because the drop boxes are lower and typically out of sight, they may not be able to figure it out as quickly that there’s other sources of money. This is one of the reasons I’ve been told we’re not supposed to ask a shift to open the lock box to get change. I’ve definitely had conflicting info about if and when I should accept over a $20. Generally, if I’m on a register, especially DTW I try to mentally keep track of any 10’s I have so if someone wants to break a larger bill I have a decent idea if I can or not. If they have a large total and I have 10’s I don’t mind, but if they’re trying to break a 100 for a $5 total I won’t accept it. I like to think if I were ever in the situation of being robbed I would be scared enough to play dumb and say I don’t know if they are asking for larger bills and/or quick enough to say the drop box was recently deposited into the safe. But I’m solely going on what I see from tv and movies and probably very naive about what it would be like in that situation.

I think it can depend on the store. There’s no company policy but some stores won’t take them because they’ll just run out of 5’s and 1’s (because we aren’t allowed to open the drop box) so quickly, also less chance of counterfeit.

We can ask if they have another form of payment but we aren’t supposed to turn away legal tender

You can accept large bills to reload gift cards because you don’t need to make change for that, you just take their cash. As others have said, it’s to mitigate the loss in the event of a robbery. A drawer full of 1s and 5s is less of a monetary loss than a box of 20s, which at my store can contain several hundred dollars if it’s during peak

Well you pointed out some people have with 50’s and 100’s and I pointed out you’re not supposed to accept that, because it drains the store of cash on hand. And if you were to be robbed, you wouldn’t be able to get the 20’s out for them because we put them in those boxes instead of the drawer 🙄

You’re not an idiot and nobody’s calling you an idiot, however if you’re a barista that means you should have gone through several trainings on what to do if a robber enters the store or any other emergency situation, which is why people are saying what they’re saying. you should’ve received training and you should know why we do that and that robbers aren’t gonna wait 10 min for you to get the shift so they can open the safety deposit box. that doesn’t make you an idiot however you either didn’t really pay attention during training or your manager failed to train you guys properly.

You were arguing constantly and refusing to accept the answer multiple times 😂😂

How would they even know it’s a cash box though?

Same here. And I apologize to them as I cancel their transaction because we don’t have change for a $5.00 order being pain with a hundred.

Let them throw a fit. Pretty soon they will realize that they will only get small bills from us and they should leave the house equipped with something other than a single 100 bill to pay for their expenses for the day.

It is never all they have. When you offer them rolled coin…. Suddenly they change their mind and remember.

Aw, thank you. It was surreal for sure but I felt safe in the fact that if I gave them the money, they would just leave and not cause violence. I had so much support from the partners. My SM, DM and RD all showed up and they got a Lyra counselor to come to our store. We shut down for two days to support the partners. It really was the best case scenario for something like this. I have to say it was handled so well.

Eh I just want to be careful with what I say here cause I’ve heard that people get fired if they post something that is against Starbucks.

Obviously if the order is $45 I'll take the 50 because there's enough change to cover it in the register but if the order is $30 or less, I'm not gonna take the 50 nor the 100 because I'm literally not allowed to.

The idea is that they don’t know about the boxes…