A friend of mine owns some ATM’s, the most profitible being in a strip club. $10.00 transaction fee and it gives, of course, ones.
Machines stocked with only $20’s are the most common for good reason. It can only hold so many total bills and if it’s all $20’s then there’s more money available in the machine at any given time. Which equals less servicing, less refilling, more profit.
My bank’s ATMs have Fast Cash options that go to $600. I wouldn’t be surprised if some banks allow withdrawals of $1000 or above.
I used to work for the company that processes most of the ATM transactions in North America and so we always had neat “cutting edge” ATMs at our building. The last one they installed before I left would both accept and dispense change and also offered postage stamp purchases.
Excellent answer. But didn’t consistency go out the window with the usually? 
I withdrew $800 from a machine in Sydney, Australia in 2003.
I remember getting tens and fives from the ATM machines that I used at college and at home.
Fives for sure, because I think I once took out 40 dollars, and it gave me a 20 and four 5’s.
An ATM will give out whatever cash it has on hand. The limit is not in the ATM but with your bank.
Check out the ATM’s in a vegas casino sometime, they are very creative with ways of getting lots of cash in your hand that you can promptly gamble away.
Heard on the radio satire program The Daily Feed:
ATM User: “Hey, what’s up? You only gave me $60, I asked for $100!”
ATM Machine (in Stephen Hawking synthesized voice): “That is not correct, I gave you a twenty and two forties.”
Changing that to “three twenties and a forty” would probably work better.
Not entirely true. Those stand alone ATM’s that are ubiquitous at diners, bars and bodegas these days often have limits on how much you can withdrawl at one time. The limit is usually around $200, though I have seen them as low as $60.
I figure this is to maximize the amount they make on the service charges. The worst are in nightclubs, where they’re not uncommonly set to a low withdrawal limit with an absurd service charge.
Heh. One time in a suburb of Chicago one of the armored car guys swapped some money into an ATM and inadvertently made the ATM believe it was full of $2 bills.
Good times… thing ran out of cash before the next morning, oddly enough.
Don’t you use cents when you deposit checks?
I don’t know about “the vast majority” of ATMs; I usually use only bank ATMs, which usually have fives and 10s. The withdrawal instruction window will tell you to “enter a dollar amount in multiples of 5,” or 10 as the case may be. I once hit the “Fast Cash $60” option and got 12 crisp new fives.
I think the best answer to the OP is “lazy programmers.”
Forcing the user to press extra buttons, especially in an environment where there are frequently lines of people waiting for their turn, isn’t good UI design.
As for the “you have to include cents for deposits so you should have to do it on withdrawals” argument, I don’t buy it. People are context-sensitive. For every example you give me where “two-zero-zero” means two, I’ll give you a stack of examples where it means two hundred.
You want the interfact to be consistent and fast? Put a decimal point on the keypad. Withdrawals (the most common transaction) are speeded up by two keystrokes and deposits are slowed down by only one. The biggest advantage of that design is that the ATM would work like the majority of computers and calculators, which people are already used to, and it would make logical sense (again, two-zero-zero should not be 2–it should be 200).
Of course, adding in a decimal point now would require every ATM user to be retrained, and would goof people up for a while. It would have been the right way to do it originally, but it would probably be a bad idea now.
I disagree strongly. Having two very similar, but slightly different procedures for the same basic operation is even worse UI design.
And lazy is such an ugly word; we prefer to think of ourselves as “efficient.”
I agree that having a decimal point key is the right way to do it. Because then it fits with the common way of writing amounts, and the common way of typing them in on a computer.
Normal machines around here have $20s and $5s, so you can get any multiple of $5. Normal around here are old fashioned monochrome displays with the aforementioned useless cent entering for nonstandard withdrawals.
The small machines in convenience stores that don’t take deposits usually only have $10s. A couple of them that I’ve seen have, on the first screen after PIN entry, withdrawal options of $110 and $130. I’ve never found out why. I thought it was a fluke the first time.
One of those small ATMs gives an audible modem dialing sequence when used. I don’t know if they all do that and they just didn’t turn the sound off on this one, or what. Having DSL, it’s the only time I ever hear a modem dialogue any more.
Maximum daily ATM withdrawal is set by the bank, from what I’ve seen. I’ve had mine increased.
Who says that deposits and withdrawals are the same basic operation? Input and output have significantly different fundamental operation. Do you use the same UI for printing and scanning? For ripping CDs and burning CDs? For viewing TV on your computer and viewing your computer screen on a TV?
For the record, ATMs are equipped with one or more of several communications methods.
Some of them use TCP/IP connections via ethernet that winds up piped through on-site routers and some of them use dial-up modems as you observed. There are also a number of ATMs that use icky 1970s-style data comm methods (SDLC comm at 4800 baud via 15-pin connections, ad nauseum) that are then encapsulated in phone lines or internet connections.
ATMs at a bank branch are less likely to use a real modem. ATMs in retail store facilities are most likely to use real modems.
Before you ask, you can’t cut the comm lines in the middle of a transaction to get a free dispense before your bank hears about it… your account has essentially already been charged before the ATM is told to spit out your $20.