STOP TALKING ABOUT COINS. This isn’t the right fn thread!
Anyway… in China the largest bill is equivalent to $12. Of course $12 is, generally, a lot more money there because of skewed exchange rates and poorness. But there’s people who make Western sallaries. Couple that with the fact that in China they don’t really use credit cards. So you pretty often deal with large stacks, sometimes huge stacks, of these red things.
Honestly, though, if you’re a drug dealer, the fatter your wad of cash the cooler you feel. If you had to go to drug deals with suitcases of $10s, you’d start going to more drug deals.
In Korea the largest bill is 10,000 won, about 10 dollars. It works pretty well in that most people use cards for any serious purchase. It’s more about the means of payment available than economy since Korea’s economy is roughly comparable to America’s on an individual’s basis.
On the subject of worthless coins, there is a 1 won coin in Korea as well. And it has no real value there in case anyone asks.
The largest bill in Thailand is 1000 baht. That’s about US$31.50 today. And it’s only been around about 10 years, maybe less. They were thinking of introducing a 10,000-baht note before the 1997 crash, but that got scrapped.
When we buy dollars before traveling abroad, we’ll usually carry $100s. Larger bills usually have a little better exchange value. We use traveler’s checks mostly, but we like to have a few hundred in cash.
I recall seeing signs in shops in Hong Kong saying they would not accept US$100 bills. These were shops that allowed you to pay in foreign currency. Other places, too. There were a lot of counterfeit 100s around at that time.
I think it’s a social thing too. I lived in the suburbs and then a small community. Now that I’m gonna graduate and move to Chicago, I see people in the poorer section of Chicago, always use hundred dollar bills. The sections like Lincoln Park, I never have seen that. But when I go looking for an apartment, (I go in the less pricely sections) I see them using hundred dollar bills at 7-11.
That is VERY odd. Most 7-11s won’t carry change for a hundred, no matter how much their clientele would like them to. Every convenience store that I know of has a drop box, which is where the clerks are supposed to deposit all 20s and checks. The clerks can’t open the drop box, and in fact can only get a limited amount of change from the safe at a time. This is to deter robbers…if people know that the corner store won’t have more than about $25 available at any time, then they won’t bother robbing the place.
Liquor stores, now, sometimes will have enough change in the drawer to break a hundred. Liquor stores also tend to have more security.
Same for casinos, at least in Nevada. The rule there is that except for the really big progressives (like Megabucks, which is actually paid out by IGT, the company running that game), the customer has to be paid in cash. One club in Carson City when I was there was on the skids, and when someone hit a $50,000 keno ticket, did not have enough money in the vault to pay him. They had to call gaming, then they gave him a check and put him up in the hotel until they could get to the bank the next morning to make good. The largest jackpot I personally paid was $13,000, 130 hundreds. 650 twenties would have been quite bulky.
That’s the kind of bulk I wouldn’t mind humping. Hundreds always ruin the fun. But could be worse. I’m glad you guys don’t hand out checks. But this reminds me of when I brought…exctly… RMB13,000 from china. 130 hundreds. Ahh, I wish there was a ho nearby I could have slapped with my money.