Iconoclastic currency

[robotech_master]

Want to have some cheap fun?

Next time you're at your bank, withdraw some money but have the teller give it to you in obscure denominations. For instance, $2 bills. (Most banks will have at least some of them, because banks are where all circulated cash eventually ends up—and since the $2 has fallen out of fashion, they don't tend to get circulated back out again unless people specifically ask for them.)

Then pay for your purchases at various stores with them, and watch the cashiers' reactions. Quite frequently they'll barely glance at them and take them for $1 bills, and you have to tell them to look again. And then they have to figure out what to do with them, because modern cash drawers don't have a place for them. (The free Taco Bell food story is probably apocryphal, but you never know.)

(I also like using the $1 coin, although it's not quite so obscure, just because it makes so much more sense to make purchases of just a buck or two with change rather than having to dig for my wallet. Unfortunately, since almost nobody else except post office vending machines uses these coins, I have to go to my bank to get more of them.)

Comments

[eagle]

All the snack vending machines around here take $5, $10, and $20 bills and give dollar coins as change, as do the ticket machines for mass transit. I've paid for things in stores several times with dollar coins and people don't even give them a second glance.

It's probably been fifteen years since I've seen a $2 bill, though.

Strip Joints

[anselm23.livejournal.com]

The Utne Reader carried a story a few months back about strip joints using $2 bills as change for all transactions, so that in many parts of the U.S., now, those bills are associated with watching women (and men) take off all their clothes. The idea is that most married men will want to shed those bills before leaving the club, and it winds up raising the pay of the women working the stage.

The Reader reported that it did in fact seem to be working as a strategy, which may explain at least some of the cashiers' reactions to your paying for purchases in $2 bills. :-)

Re: Strip Joints

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw that in the Wikipedia entry about the two dollar bill, which I checked later. The strip clubs aren't the only ones using two dollar bills, though. There's a cadre of wheresgeorgers who see it as their mission to increase the circulation of the $2 (I guess everybody's got to have a hobby), and actually have their banks order them from the Federal Reserve.

And Steve Wozniak has been known to buy uncut sheets of them, have them bound and perforated, and pay for purchases by tearing off $2 bills as if they were stamps. Heh. There's always someone more iconoclastic than oneself, isn't there?

[foomf.livejournal.com]

The MAX (light rail) here in Portland dispenses dollar coins from its change machines, and accepts them for purchases.

The vending machines at Intel also return dollar coins and accept them.

On the other hand, I don't know any machine that accepts two dolalr bills, and I have had them refused at stores, and been threatened with arrest over it. I even had the manager misquote the "phony as a three dollar bill" thing at me. It was amusing.