Small-to-medium of exchange

This afternoon in the grocery store, the man in front of me was owed 80 dirhams in change. A dirham is a hundredth of a riyal, which makes it a little more than a quarter of a cent. Because dirhams are worth so little, the coins are hard to come by; 50 dirham coins are pretty common, but I've only seen a smaller denomination once.

So the grocery store clerk gave the man a 50 dirham coin but still owed him 30 dirhams, which she couldn't give him because she didn't have any coins that small. (To recap, we're talking about eight cents here.) So she gave him a 25-dirham pack of chewing gum instead, out of a box she had sitting on her cash register for just that purpose.

So, apparently, the currency of Qatar is the Qatari riyal, subdivided into dirhams and sticks of gum.