My understanding is that race-tracks, dogs, horses, are the last bastion of the $2 bills.
While you can bet $2 at a race track, I’ve never seen a $2 bill there. But, most people tend to place more than just a simple $2 bet for a horse to win. I’ll often place a win bet, an across the board bet, a boxed exacta, and perhaps a daily double when I’m at the track.
I’ve never received a $2 bill from cashing in a winning ticket.
I can’t recall the last time I saw a $2 bill. In Canada they have been replaced by toonies (or is that twonies?)
When I was young I sometimes wondered where I got my ornery impulses. Turns out they came from my dad.
In the early 80’s he and my mom sold the house I grew up in. I don’t know how the process worked, but for some reason of financing he had to produce $2000 to the real estate office. Dad was going to write a check but the doofus office manager insisted on a certified, not a personal, check. Dad was offended as he felt the guy implied(which I think he did) that dad might not be good for the total.
So on the appointed day for doing the paperwork Dad showed up. And he’d been to the bank, and got $2000 in cash, mostly ones, but a few fives. He took them out of their paper bands and tossed the cash, stuffing it it a brown bag. Then, when asked for payment, he dumped it out on the guys desk. He says the dude got red in the face and stamped his feet like a kid, saying “I won’t take this!” Dad says then that his only mistake was not taking the money back, because he’d offered legal tender which the manager had refused.
I’d loved to have seen that much green swishing around.
I had a handyman who insisted on being paid in cash. I eventually realized that he did not have a bank account, and that it was highly unlikely that he paid any income tax, ever.
He only showed up to work when he needed money immediately. Once I was recuperating at home from surgery and was unable to drive anywhere, such as to the bank for cash. He agreed to be paid by check until I was able to drive, but when I wrote him a check, he threw a fit and informed me that it cost him $5 to cash my check.
More than once he arrived in a vehicle running on fumes, with not even a couple of bucks to buy gas.
He was also a liar and a manipulator. He never gave up trying to “borrow” money from me with promises of future work that never materialized. He once asked for money to bail a friend of his out of jail.
Some people live very differently than most of us.
When I cash a check or withdraw cash from my bank, I always ask for two dollar bills, but for the last few years, none have been available. Guess I need to frequent some strip clubs, but there are none local. I lead an un-charmed life, fersure. 
Up until quite recently in UK law there was no limit on legal tender and a cheque was made valid by having the legally required details and only that. So you could write a cheque on anything and that would be legal tender. Or offer to pay a £1000 debt with 100,000 1p coins. It only applied to paying debts, as that’s what “legal tender” means (in the UK, anyway), but it’s not uncommon for people to dispute debts and be annoyed at having to pay them. Apparently, a farmer who disagreed with a tax assessment wrote a correctly worded and signed cheque on a live horse and took the horse to their local tax office. They’d offered legal tender to pay a debt, so the debt was settled even though the tax office didn’t process the payment.
It might have happened. It could have happened - that definitely was the law regarding cheques and legal tender. It was changed. Perhaps because of the horse cheque or perhaps just because of the possibility of it happening.
This thread reminds me that I should probably get around to doing something with the kilos of coins I have lying around. I probably have ~£100 in 10p coins alone. That doesn’t mean that I’m a really bad tipper at strip clubs 
I have some jars I drop bits of change in when I get home. It adds up over time.
I just took possession of my dad’s old collection of foreign money, most of it dating from the 1970s and earlier. I found 6 two schilling coins, 4 one schilling coins as well as 2 one pound notes. I also have some 10 new pence coins and some 50 new pence coins, since they haven’t changed, I’ll bring those to the UK with me next trip, they’re not really rare.
I’ve also got a bunch of pre Euro coins and notes, mostly Belgium and Germany.
I visited my parents last week, and they gave me an envelope that my Dad had found while doing some decluttering. It contained a nice note from his cousin, wishing me a happy first birthday, and enclosed $16 made up of two $5 bills and three $2 bills. The fives were from his cousin and her husband, and the twos were from their three kids. I checked the dates – they were all from before 1964.
I haven’t yet decided what I will do with them – maybe buy myself a nice onesie and a rattle.
I always carry a $2 bill in my wallet for luck. I just checked and it’s from 1976, probably a recognition of the bicentennial. So I guess the other bills aren’t that much older.
Same in the US, basically. ‘This note is legal tender for all debts public and private’ is written on money but has been construed by courts narrowly as a debt already incurred. If the merchant refuses to hand over the goods unless given the form of payment they want, no debt has been incurred.
A lot of people in the US IME though seem to think that the saying on the money means it has to be accepted, though they’ve presumably gone into some of the many establishments with signs for example ‘we don’t accept bills bigger than $20’. I guess they never noticed those or figured the merchant couldn’t enforce it if push came to shove. But a store is just as able to say they won’t take $100’s as say they won’t take credit cards. At the other end of the denomination spectrum Walmart could make a policy of not taking $2 bills for $200 payments. They don’t presumably because it doesn’t impact their business much to accept small bills on big purchases the few times it happens, other customers might see signs prohibiting it as petty tyranny by Walmart even if they had no intention of using small bills for big purchases themselves, or there might be disagreeable scenes if there were no signs but other customers saw an argument by some sympathetic looking person trying to pay with small bills.
Same why they used to do it with food stamps, trade it for less the actual value. EBT cards can be used the same way, buy $100 worth of groceries and sell it for $80 or less.
Many years ago, I worked at a pizza restaurant on Saturday afternoons. We had a couple of regular customers. An attractive young woman and her large and scowling boyfriend. She always paid their bill from a large roll of damp $1 bills she carried. We always wondered why they were damp, like they’d been washed. Then, a one of our co-workers went to a strip club on a Friday night and recognized her and her scowling bouncer boyfriend. I guess I should have been grateful that she’d wash the cash that had been stuffed in her g string, but i could never convince myself that it was really washed enough.
Or the Tooth Fairy. That’s what my brother did.
Most banks and credit unions ask if you have an account if you want coins counted because they charge a fee if you don’t.
My uncle recently died & I cleaned out his house. He had numerous jars & boxes full of weird bills & coins-- Silver dollars, $2 bills, Sacagawea dollar coins, Quarters for all 50 states, wheat pennies, etc.
He willed them to my kids, so I’ll tell them to take them to the bank rather than the Lawn & Garden Center for redemption.
Here in Taiwan, you can only have one particular bank even give you larger denomination bills for your change or small bills. I discovered this when I tried to get bills for a ton of change that I collect as the treasurer for a group.
Taiwan has a huge problem with people working off the books, and it’s a way to try to regulate it. I don’t know what the vendors at the food stalls in the night markets do. Most of their sales are conducted in coins or small bills and I can’t see them rushing out to declare that income.
Do they pay their vendors in coins? Hmmm.
The city where I used to work had a factory that gave their employees a roll of Sacajawea dollars every year at Christmas. There was an arcade that always did a booming business afterwards, because they had machines that offered an extra play for using one of those, vs. $1 in quarters.
I’m a store cashier, and I do handle payments like that. Sometimes it’s someone getting paid in cash, or who saves bills, or from a collection someone took up for them. We get a lot of those around the December holidays.
I’m no fan of big bills when we first open. Buy something for $1.99 and give me a hundred dollar bill? There’s a bank across our parking lot, and I’m sure they can give you change.
I’m just coming in to say that around these parts we use “dimwit” or “nitwit” or sometimes even “halfwit”. Nimwit is a new one for me. Thanks for adding to my lexicon.
I thought it was nimrod / dimwit. But maybe it was nitwit / dimwit…
Oh, we use nimrod as well. Wait, that’s a proper noun so you have to refer to someone as Nimrod.