I’m surprised I’m the first to post this old joke.
A mathematician and his young son are walking down the street.
The son sees a hundred dollar bill lying in the sidewalk and excitedly points it out to his father. The father however just steps over it without even looking down.
“Daddy, why didn’t you pick up that hundred dollar bill?”
“Son, this is a busy street and hundreds of people walk by this point every hour. Statistically speaking, if there was a hundred dollar bill lying in the street somebody else would have picked it up before we got here. So there was no point in stopping for a hundred dollar bill that couldn’t be there.”
I pick up any coins I come across, usually pennies. Several years ago, I found a 1914-D penny in a parking lot. In that condition, it’s worth several hundred dollars.
A funny story about my ex, when we lived in NYC: He came home on a Saturday evening and said that he lost his new, expensive gloves. He had an idea where he had lost them, but i pointed out that it was a very busy location, and surely someone would have found them and taken them. He kept wanting us to go back and check. I was tired and said that we could go first thing in the morning, though I still doubted they’d still be there. Next morning, we went to the location, already busy with pedestrian traffic, and lo and behold - there were his gloves, exactly as he had left them, one neatly atop the other.
I’ve found a 20 dollar bill on the ground on two separate occasions. The first was on the sidewalk while walking from my apartment to a friend’s house which was just around the corner. The second time was in a shopping center parking lot.
There’s a popular urban legend that it isn’t worth Bill Gates’ time to pick up a $100 dollar bill off the ground because he earns much more than that in interest in the time it takes to pick it up. However, when he was asked recently, he said he would still pick it up and attempt to return it to the owner. If he couldn’t, he would donate it to his foundation because $100 still buys a lot of stuff.
One day I barely got to work on time, sans caffeine, and rushed to the convenience store next door. Opened the door, walked in, and two steps later bent down and picked up a c-note that just happened to be laying there and stuck it in my pocket. In my coffee-deprived stupor, I wondered if that just really happened. After obtaining and ingesting said substance, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was a good day to show up for work late and hungover.
I did a year of hands-on research for this (although my results chiefly focus on coins). Generally speaking:
I found more of the smaller values than the larger ones (and it was easy to fit an obvious curve to this)
The plot points dipped below the curve for more conspicuously visible/physically larger denominations (regardless of face value - a UK 10p coin is larger and more shiny than a 20p - and I found more 20p coins than 10p)
Larger denominations are probably less common in people’s pockets, so there is a smaller pool out there to be lost - and people are probably more careful/conscious of larger values than smaller.
My very rough rule of thumb (if my results can reasonably be extrapolated) - you are about five times more likely to find any given denomination than you are to find the next value up.
Back when I used to carry cash, I used to love it when Fall would come to and end and it was time to break out the winter jackets. I would almost always find a 20 stuffed away in one of the various pockets.
It’s like winning the lottery except the one winning it is the same one that funded it!
One time back in 2019 when I was in sophomore year I was walking to the bus stop on a rainy day and found a soaked $20 bill sitting in a puddle on the side of the road.
