# Legal tender and businesses refusing large bills

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legal-tender-and-businesses-refusing-large-bills/191070>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 26, 2003, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legal-tender-and-businesses-refusing-large-bills/191070 "2003-07-26T12:39:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 9

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**Author:** ![Tusculan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2003, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legal-tender-and-businesses-refusing-large-bills/191070/9 "2003-07-26T21:30:47Z")

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Surely I’m missing something here.

You say: “When you desire to buy an item, you owe a debt to the owner.” Then you say “if the owner refuses to sell, there is no debt”.

I say: there is only a debt if you ‘decide’ to purchase (actually, as says **scarlett** , after offering to buy) _and_ the owner agrees to sell.

In so far we are in complete agreement. But the thing is, if you leave out the latter part (as you first did), you miss the essence of the discussion here. It is simply not true that you incur a debt as soon as you decide to purchase. You only do, once you _act_ on it and this is accepted by the owner. And only in that situation would the question of the OP have any relevance.

You may thing this is sheer pedantry. The problem is that we are talking about a legal issue here, and law is concerned with such pedantry.

Actually your last post looks as if you are roughly saying the same as me and the other posters, but in that case it would have helped if you would have added a little bit of explanation to your first post.

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