So that’s what that joke is! Folks quote the punchline all the time, but nobody ever seems to know the setup.
On the subject of $2 bills being unlucky, a few days before the Battle of Midway, one of the pilots from the ill-fated Torpedo Eight found a $2 bill while walking along the beach, and kept it because he thought it would be good luck. A few days later, he and one of the gunners from his TBF Avenger were among the three survivors from the entire squadron after attempting to attack the Japanese fleet without fighter escort.
And yeah, I’ve noticed a lack of $10 bills lately too. Many places I go to, if I spend $5 or less and pay with a $20, I will more likely get 3 $5 bills than a $10 and a $5 (probably because it’s simpler to just divide $15 by 3 than it is to subtract 10 and then find the difference).
And nah, you don’t always spend $1 bills just because you have them. Sometimes you’re in a hurry and you don’t want to hold up the line counting your ones at the register when you can just hand them a $20 and let them make change (since you’d have to count out however much money in ones, then they’ll have to count it out, etc., and let’s not even talk about if you are paying exact change down to the penny). It’s pretty easy to wind up with a large accumulation of small bills. Hell, a few times I’ve found that I was carying $5 or more in loose change in my pocket because I never counted it and payed with paper money (I keep my loose change in a little drawstring bag in my pocket, so I can get to it more easily).
I did open a thread about the vanishing $10 bills, but I’m not going to link to it due to the impossibility of searching for the word “ten”. Somebody posted statistics for the various denomination bills in ciculation, and they definitely are becoming rare. After $2s, $10s and $50s were about tied for second rarest. Which just goes to show you. You almost never see 50s either…at least IME, any time I have a large amount of cash in my possession, like a few hundred, it has almost always been mostly a combination of hundreds and twenties.
I distinctly remember seeing $50 bills at like, three times in my life, one of them when I first started college.
When I was a kid, my Dad was in the Lions Club and they had Bingo every thursday night. He was treasurer one year and would bring home a cigar box full of money every Thursday night to bring to the bank the next morning. He’d go through the box and prepare the deposit and trade out any $2 bills and silver certificates.
It was very rare he’d ever get a good $2 bill because the corners were almost always torn off. He told me that most of them came from elderly black people (this was in the 70s, so I guess most of them were born around the turn of the century).
The $10 bills are probably all in Louisiana. We have legalized video poker here and the law requires that the machines not accept bills larger than $10.00.
Go into any bar or restaurant and they won’t even have $20’s in the till at the beginning of the shift, but they’ll always have at least $1000 worth of $10s.
Yes it is sort of pointless to have both a $10 and $20 bill. It looks like the $20 bill is winning out.
$1, $5, $20, $100 are good choices each bill is roughly 4 or 5 times greater than the previous one. You see roughly the same thing with US coins 1 cent 5 cents 25 cents. I don’t know about you but I see dimes much less frequently than pennies, nickels or quarters.
Indeed, and it’s a crying shame, cause I like dimes more.
I’m surprised how different the distribution of notes are in the US. In Canada there really aren’t any “rare” denominations until you hit the $100 mark. Even when our under-$5 denominations were still made of paper they were common as dirt. These days loonies and twonies (our terms for the $1 and $2 coins) are hella common, and $10s and $50s are everywhere. Whenever I take a largish sum of money out of the bank (in excess of $200, usually) I’ll be given about 75% of it in $50 bills, with the balance in $20s and whatever it takes to make up the rest. $100 bills aren’t uncommon but typically aren’t given out in withdrawals of anything less than, say, $500 or more. This is largely due to the fact that most stores that don’t sell big ticket items won’t accept anything higher than $50 bills, and with some stores they even require ID for $50 bills (to hedge against counterfeiting, even though the newest issue of bills contain holographic imagery and security threads that are damn near impossible to copy)
This is likely why it seems odd to me that there’s such an imbalance of the same denominations in the US. We use every denomination available in roughly proportional quantities, and it seems a little hard to believe that the primary reason is simply that most cash registers aren’t configured to handle them. There must have been a reason tills were designed that way in the first place despite the availability of the bills they should have been designed to hold.
Simple-it doesn’t meet a significant need. I have never carried so many ones that my wallet was too full. Getting $1.50 in change (in coins presumably) is more inconvienent than getting $0.50 in coins. Of course if we keep the paper dollar that would solve my problem and…get us to exactly where we are right now.
Umm… What would be the point of checking ID if I pay with a $50? are you going to record my DL number and the bill’s serial number? If I was a counterfeiter, i would just “forget” my ID, and you would likely take my bill anyway.
They photocopy your driver’s license. I tried this at a Subway a few weeks back, because I had nothing smaller, and unfortunately I don’t have a driver’s license. I spent five minutes arguing my case, which included but was not limited to them suggesting I go begging to stores in the vicinity to make change for it. I had photo ID, but their policy stated they only accepted drivers licenses. The girl finally relented when I convinced her that there was no alternative available. I think the only reason she did that though was because I had over $20 worth of subs already made and she’d have had to explain the waste to her manager.
I always liked the 2 dollar bill and carried them when I could. I also carried the Sacagawea dollars.
Weird. I do admit that I rarely have a $50 bill and even more rarely have a $100 bill, but all those times I’ve had one I have never had any problem using it. Several years ago the ATMs I use dispensed 20s and 50s (they now seem to just dispense 20s) so I had a lot more 50s to spend; no problem whatsoever.
I think it has to do with the rash of counterfeiting attempts over the last few years – in spite of the fact that most of them have been laughably poor. (I think only one case involved so-called “supernotes” and even those were the older bills with fewer and more easily duplicated security features) I frequently get $50s though when dealing with my bank and withdrawing larger sums of money, and I try and spend them first with the larger purchases, because I know if I fail to do so I’m going to end up like I did at Subway: Stuck with a large bill no one wants and a (comparatively) small purchase. Fortunately they aren’t that hard to get rid of, it’s just a bit of a pain. I wouldn’t care if the larger denominations weren’t treated suspiciously by most smaller establishments.
In his modest currency collection, my father has a couple of $2 bills. But the ones he really prizes are Bicentennial (1976) $2 bills. He also has a few hundred Bicentennial quarters.
Not that he’s under the illusion that they’re worth anything more than their face value. But they’re pretty neat to look at.
There was a news story a while back (sorry, no cite) about a nudist resort in Florida whose patrons were encouraged to pay for their purchases in the local community with $2 bills. This was supposed to be a show of economic force and to educate the local business owners about the positive economic impact of nude tourism.
I’ve thought about trying to spearhead a similar movement here in Springfield, IL. A few months ago, the city banned smoking in virtually all indoor workplaces (bars, bowling alleys and restaurants included). I think it would be cool if we nonsmokers paid for our business with $2 bills, as a way of letting the bar owners know that our money is just as good as the smokers’ money. However, I don’t think it would catch on. That, and my bank just looks at my cross-eyed when I was for $2 bills.
Actually, I don’t see $50 bills very commonly. I guess this is because I do almost all of my withdrawals at the ATM, which usually only delivers $20 bills. My grandmother, though, usually gives us a $50 bill at Christmas and at our birthday. I guess she specifically asks the bank teller for them. Last time, I didn’t have much trouble spending it, but I think it was because the cashier knew me. Many stores don’t accept $50 bills.
Hundred dollar bills are even rarer. A few years ago I went to a conference, and I was allowed to claim $200 to cover my housing costs. They gave us the money in the form of two $100 bills (brand new, if I remember correctly). I was shocked, since I never see them in circulation. And there’s not much to do with them except deposit them.
You’re right that the other denominations are all pretty common, but I think that the $5 is slightly more common than the $10. My experience is similar to Raguleader’s (except that his is with US bills): when a cashier gives me back $15, it’s more often in the form of three fives than a ten and a five.
I get the general impression (in the US at least) that, when there is a currency in denomination X and another in denomination 2X, one of these becomes redundant and eventually far less popular unless there is some mitigating circumstance. There’s just no advantage to holding a single $2 bill over two $1 bills.
Quarters are fairly common, but 50-cent pieces aren’t. Dollar bills are ubiquitous, the $2 bill genuinely rare. And we’ve seen the $10 bill fall in popularity over the past few years to the $5 and $20 (the latter most likely because of ATMs). IMHO $50 bills are also not nearly as circulated as the $100 (the popularity of the $20 may again be a factor here).
The one great exception is nickles and dimes, which I believe are pretty much equally circulated. My personal explanation for that is twofold: (1) the dime is smaller in size–more cash for less weight!, and (2) the dime used to be made of silver, giving it perhaps a higher intrinsic/psychological value than two nickles. That’s just an opinion, but it works for me.