~30 years ago I was shift manager at a Burger King, outside Detroit. Being close to Windsor, we'd get... probably 2-3 transactions per month where people wanted to use Canadian money. Not a huge deal really - at least at that time, Detroit folks were at least accustomed to seeing it, if not accepting it. The exchange rate was
generally ~80c USD to 1 CAD - it fluctuated - sometimes as much as 90c, sometimes below 80. Our store policy was we'd honor $1 CAD at 75c USD.
Most people didn't complain, but now and then someone would complain - "I can get 85c at the bank!". I'd reply something like... "you're free to do that, but it's 9:30 on a Saturday night - we're about your only option - most other places aren't even open, and the ones that are might not take your CAD at all". Oh, and many of the banks wouldn't exchange $ for you unless you were a customer. All that over a $10 meal for 3 people. The difference of an entire potential dollar.
It was my job to bank the money, and we'd end up getting odd reconciliations days or weeks later indicating that that $1163.45 we'd deposited on April 16 was really $1164.32 because of the exchange rate we got when the bank processed the deposit. We probably 'made' $100 in arbitrage for the whole year, but people would complain about it sometimes, that we were 'ripping them off'.
