I remember the first time I carried around several hundred Francs to go buy something. It was weird.

At some point, however, I noticed that the lady at the Kiosk has no problem with you paying for a small pack of gum with a CHF 100 note.

Few muggings/stickups = ease making change/carrying cash = less pricing pressure on consumer banking?

Yeah, it's the same in Japan. I can drop a 10,000 yen note on a can of beer or whatever, and the cash register people don't even blink, they just change it accordingly. No huff or anything. I will hate going back to American cashiers with their attitudes about everything under the sun. Even the glummiest of glum people here have nice enough personalities. I knew there were problems in American culture before I left it, but living outside of it showed me there were even more than I thought, in ways I didn't realize were problems until I lived somewhere with an alternative way of handling things that I assumed were just normal and not of great importance, but in fact they were all along. Anyway, good luck settling in to your new culture, David. I'm about ready to come back and see how America feels after all this time.

Yet when I was in Prague, I could rarely find someone able and willing to cash a 200-crown note (what was Amex *thinking* giving those out in its ATM?), and in Istanbul I often had trouble getting change for a 50,000 lira note.