It could just be me and the places I’m going to, but it seems increasingly to be the case that if I’m at the market and I request $20 cash back, I get four $5 bills (instead of two tens or a twenty), or if I break a twenty at lunch I get back two fives instead of a ten. I’m not saying it happens most of the time, or even especially often, but it seems to happen more often than it used to.
I wonder about this because it’s arguable that we don’t really need the 10 anyway. It’s hardly more trouble to have a given number of $5 bills over half that many $10 bills. Or if you have, say $15, no tenspots means you’d have three bills instead of two, which is no big deal.
So what’s the deal? Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? Is there a reason for it? I’m thinking it might make the task of giving change easier for cashiers.
Not helpful, admittedly, but I have noticed a similar phenomenon here. I’d say about 40% of the time when I go into a bank branch the tellers don’t have any $10 notes.
It’s due to ATMs. From what I can tell ATMs never have 10s - some only have 20s and others have only 20s and 5s. 95% of the time when I get cash it’s from an ATM.
The ATMs for my credit union have tens. Actually, it’s always been my experience that tens are a tad rarer than other bills - you’re just as likely to get two fives, whereas I’d be quite shocked at getting two tens in place of a twenty. They’re simply not as useful, as observed above.
I’ve never seen a ATM that gave 20s and 5s. Almost every one I’ve ever seen have 20s and 10s. I would love an ATM that gave 5s.
As I cashier I always seem to be running out of my 10s before anything else. I think it has more to do with the 20 being so popular. If all you have is 20s and you’re buying $10 or less (which people often do) you’re going to get a 10 back. So you run out of them fairly quickly. The worst part is that when you’re out of 10s and you need to give away three fives to make $15 change. My theory: Its not so much that there’re fewer 10s, but they’re all gone early in the day. And since you’re still able to make change without them businesses don’t really stock up on them. But we always make sure we have plenty of 5s, especially having to give them away three at a time.
This might just be because I work for a small store and we’ve only one till for the whole day, and it only starts with $100.
I talked to a friend of mine who is a bank VP about this, she had an idea on what might cause at least part of it.
They get charged a fee per ‘strap’ of bills they buy and $10s have less per strap than 5’s or 20’s do. So overall it’s just cheaper for them to buy those. So it would seem that at least part of the answer is that it is just more economical to buy mostly 5’s and 20’s.
Wow, do you work for me? That’s exactly how our setup is. But I’d like to add, from the other end, as the person who counts all the money at the end of the day and takes it to the bank. I haven’t noticed any difference in the amount of tens that come throughm at least not over the past 3 years or so.
There’s also no reason to buy 10’s or 20’s unless your business sells alot of small ticket items and the clients use big bills. We can ALWAYS make change with 5’s and 1’s and it’s the 5’s and 1’s you don’t want to run out of. In fact those are the bills I stock pile in the safe, if I have to buy bills from the bank those are the only ones. BTW while the fee is obnoxious, it’s not a huge deal. I think it’s about nine or fifteen cents per strap. I’ve never bought 10’s but I’m guessing there’s $1000 in a strap of tens. And now that I think about it, if the fee is causing people to buy fives instead of tens from the bank, it won’t make any difference. If they have to give a client back ten dollars, what difference (from the standpoint of the fee) does it make if it’s two fives or one ten?
There’s also no reason to buy 10’s or 20’s unless your business sells alot of small ticket items and the clients use big bills. We can ALWAYS make change with 5’s and 1’s and it’s the 5’s and 1’s you don’t want to run out of. In fact those are the bills I stock pile in the safe, if I have to buy bills from the bank those are the only ones. BTW while the fee is obnoxious, it’s not a huge deal. I think it’s about nine or fifteen cents per strap. I’ve never bought 10’s but I’m guessing there’s $1000 in a strap of tens. And now that I think about it, if the fee is causing people to buy fives instead of tens from the bank, it won’t make any difference. If they have to give a client back ten dollars, what difference (from the standpoint of the fee) does it make if it’s two fives or one ten?
Another possible reason for this is that many cash registers have only 4 currency slots. These are typically used for $1, $5, $20, & checks. There just isn’t room for all the denominations, and the $10 is the most easily dropped – it can be replaced by 2 $5 bills, a $5 and 5 $1, or even 10 $1 bills. If the cashier receives a $10 bill, it goes in the overflow (under the drawer) along with any $50 or $100 bills.
So the store typically does not use $10 bills, and does not order any when getting change. So it tends to become less common in circulation, since stores aren’t ordering supplies of it, therefore the Bureau of Engraving prints less of them.
Some data from the Federal Reserve: As of 2005 there are about 8.8 billion one dollar bills in circulation, 5.8 billion twenties, 5.4 billion hundreds, 2.1 billion fives, 1.6 billion tens, 1.2 billion fifties, and a mere 700 million or so two-dollar bills. The ten does beat out the fifty (and of course the poor two); I guess most people get their money from ATM’s, so the twenty-dollar bill is in 2nd place (after the one); and the high rollers among us probably figure if you’re going for a big bill you might as well go all the way for C-note. (The $500 bills and up, though still counted, are no longer being issued.)
Over the last 15 years, the ten has definitely lost ground on the five; there used to be about equal numbers of those denominations in circulation. And the hundred has boomed; in 1990, hundreds made up just over 10% of the total volume of notes in circulation, now its over 20%.
:dubious:
Not where I shop or work.
Every register draw I’ve seen has 5 slots, $1, $5, $10, $20 and another for checks, coupons and whatever other items need to go into the drawer. The 50’s usually end up under the drawer, in the extra slot or in with the 20’s.
I’ve never once seen store with a register that didn’t have a slot for $10s, and that goes for both shopping as a customer and as a retail employee in a lot of different stores. I also can’t remember the last time I saw a drawer with only four slots. I have seen a few, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth, IME. So, I think that theory’s shot.
My WAG is that there is less demand for $10 dollar bills.
$100s and $50s are for large grocery purchases and major purchases where you usually only get singles back in change.
$20s are most “useful”. A $20 can last the entire day. For everyday purchases you can break a $20 into $5s and singles. A $10 dollar bill is not large enough in certain situtions but not small enough in others. It’s kind of like the $2 dollar bill.
I just moved back to the states and noticed this. The first few days I was back, I was really hoping to get a new ten, since I hadn’t seen one. It seemed I was getting multiple fives way more often than when I left only 9 months ago. Could just be an observation bias on my part, can’t say for sure.
Y’all have one and two dollar coins up there, right? I think that would change the equation quite a lot. Since we’re talking about bills and cash register slots, how do Canadian cashiers handle the “extra” coins? In the US, some of the resistance to dollar coins is because cash registers don’t have a bin for them.
I’ve not seen a ten in the USA (where I live) in ages. Here in Ontario (where I am) I get them all over the place. Many, many times when I’m due a five for change, I get coins instead – a couple of toonies and a loonie (twos and a one).
I kind of respect the fact they’ve gotten rid of such small paper currency, but damn! I’m tired of all of these coins all over the place. They go into a coin basket and I forget all about them.
ATMs here only dispense $20 and $50 notes, which drives me mad, because quite often I only want $10 to tide me over until payday or whatever… it’s very annoying when you discover that it’s the day before payday, you haven’t got any cash in your wallet, and there’s $17.24 in your bank account- more than enough to buy lunch, but not enough to get a $20 from an ATM.
Sure, you can get $10 out via EFTPOS (say, at the post office) but the whole point of ATMs is so you don’t have to stand in line just to get a small amount of cash out of your account.
I can’t say I’ve noticed a shortage of $10 notes, lately… we see plenty of them coming through work, I still get them as change, and the bank and post office never seem to have any trouble providing them. .