Cash only

Found next to the checkout at a recent supermarket visit

Buying here is a bit different than in other places I've lived.  You pay for everything with cash. Mobile money (essentially using mobile phone credits as currency by transferring them to someone else's account), which is really widely used in Kenya, exists for transfers between friends and family and is beginning to catch on for paying power or water bills here, but less for goods and services. Credit cards are totally useless, except to withdraw cash from the cash machine at a bank, and the banknotes you get from the cash machine are 10,000 CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) francs, worth about $20. Around here that will buy you a lot of just about anything.



Stock photo of mine from a market stall

It doesn't sound that different, but it has some unexpected consequences. For one thing, small change is really valuable.  You would happily accumulate your weight in coins if only you could wait the half hour after paying your bill for the waiter to go down the street to all the other restaurants, bars and shops until he finds someone who can break your $20, and brings you back the change and the chewing gum or pack of Kleenex he had to buy to get it.  Instead, you usually unload your precious shrapnel and hope to be able to pick up some more at the supermarket.

In the street market, where they set their own prices, they can make them nice and round, or give you a discount, throwing in an extra papaya, like a fruit stall vendor did for me this morning.  The papaya sold for about $0.20, and it brought the total of my purchases (half a kilo of onions, an avocado and a pineapple) to $2.  And if you have to break a big note there's usually a bench nearby they'll invite you to sit on while they go around to all their vendor colleagues to get your change.



Official cobbler of the Man football club

Places you go to regularly, like the corner boutiques that sell powdered milk and dried goods and soap and stuff like that, may give you the old-fashioned kind of credit. They'll write down that you owe them so much or that they owe you, and next time it gets added or subtracted from your total.

The fancier the place though, the more complicated it gets. Supermarkets and pharmacies have prices just like in supermarkets and pharmacies all over the world - 1,990 CFA francs for a box of cookies, for example (almost $4 - yes, the supermarkets are also quite a bit more expensive than the street markets). You can probably pay with credit card in Abidjan, where they set the prices, so they don't really care. Here though you end up adding whatever random items they have at the checkout until it comes to a number that the cashier can make change for.  Sometimes those items are pretty special though, like the Obama Biscuits (about $0.05) I found this week.