I know there's a coin shortage...
 

...and while I appreciate you cleaning out the piggy bank, I still cannot accept $20 in pennies, nickels and dimes. That's not what "exact change" means. If you want to do that go to SCO; the system doesn't care what form of tender it gets but it will tell you if you're short (which I'm sure you are and you're hoping I miss that fact). Humans are allowed by law to refuse an "unreasonable amount" of coinage.

Most functioning people take "please pay with exact change" to mean just that; bills and then the exact change (or an approximation thereof) if you have it. I had a couple people who chose to pay with all change, and I wasn't clued in to this until I had already started tendering the transaction...I didn't direct them to the Coinstar because I know that cash takes a fee and I didn't know if they still offered store gift cards (that would also take longer, because there was no manager to be had so I couldn't suspend the transaction).

I was going to suggest CoinStar when I started to read too.

But $20 in smaller coins is too much. I have done $20 in toonies ($2 coins) but I would not expect someone to take that in nickels and dimes.

The CDH sent some girls to Coinstar when they tried this a couple days ago; come to find they did have EXACT change and were none too happy upon finding out the machine took a cut (so while they did now have cash, they were short and had to run home anyway to get more :doh:

Some people who pay with mountains of change are just doing it to be a dick, but some are honestly calculating things to the penny and don't have extra handy (I've been in that situation myself a couple times).

One evening in roughly a 90 minute time frame, I had not one but TWO customers pay with all change one was about $13 and the other was $16. Not soon after someone wanted to and eventually did pay with $9 in NICKELS ONLY. At least I didn't have to count the drawer at the end of the night.

That rotator cuff, you know...

Been a while since I used a CoinStar, but the ones I've seen have a deal where there's no fee if you convert it all into store credit rather than getting it back in bills/cash. Do they not do that anymore?

The last one I used was in a Giant Eagle and you could not get store credit from it. The best no fee option was I believe an amazon gift card. But that was about 10 years ago.

Ours has no-fee gift cards, but they're national brands like Amazon, Gamestop, Starbucks etc. Back when I first started working there you could get gift cards for our store, but I haven't seen that option for quite some time...they probably saw that not many people were doing that option so got rid of it.

CoinStar gets a kickback from the gift card providers to offset their percent taken. More likely, your store opted out.

Reminds me of a really, really old Reader's Digest story, in which the change is going the other direction. A woman gets on a trolley car for which the fare is 5 cents. She hands the conductor a $5 bill and says "I'm very sorry, I don't have a nickel". He responds "Don't worry, lady, in a few minutes you'll have 99".