Am I understanding correctly? The equivalent of $853 is normal for grocery shopping and you withdraw the equivalent of one or two $853 bills for post office payments? That ($853, I mean) is about a month’s rent in a decent apartment here.
Indonesia uses the rupia, and the 100,000 rupiah note is their highest denomination.
Paying groceries with a CHF1000 bill may not be an everyday occurence, but the cashier does not choke or panick when she sees such a bill. Grocery bills often exceed CHF100 ($80) for people with children or for restaurant owners. And the next bigger denomination is CHF1000.
A month’s rent here is over $1000.
Also we occasionally have large sums to pay; don’t you?
Baffle: mailing a letter costs the equivalent of 65 to 70 cents. Quite high if you consider the size of the country (something like one of the eastern states). But distance is not the determining factor in postal rates. Handling is.
I’m pretty sure nobody would accept an $850 bill at a grocery store here. Lots of places already treat $100 bills like a huge nuisance…
Yeah, same over here. £50 and £100 notes are in circulation but you hardly ever see them as most places eye them with great suspicion and many simpky refuse to accept them.
So, surprising to hear Switzerland is so big on cash. I’m sure the US and UK would have higher value notes now were it not for the fact that plastic rules for big transactions. Who wants to carry that amount of money about?
Gymnopithys, I think the point people are making is that you wrote that you “withdraw one or two 1000 CHF bills at the bank” in order to make “large payments at the post office”. The implication seemed to be that sometimes a single 1000 CHF note wouldn’t be sufficient for your post office payment and you’d need a second one. A post office payment in excess of the equivalent of $853 seems unreasonably large.
No kidding. Can you imagine stopping by for a gallon of milk, and paying with a $850 bill? You wait for your $845.50 change.
But the poster says that the average grocery bill “sometimes” exceeds 100CHF, so he pays with a 1000CHF bill? That’s a boatload of change…9 100CHF bills? The equivalent of $600 in change? That’s an armed robber’s dream. Stores here don’t carry anywhere near that kind of cash…
I’m not Gymnopithys, but I do know that the post office in many European countries has traditionally had wider functions than the USPS. For instance, when I moved here to Troll Country, some household bills were sent out as a payment form called a “postgiro”, which originally was intended to be paid at the post office, as opposed to a “bankgiro” which was originally to be paid at a bank. Now, by the time of my arrival in 1990, the banks happily accepted payment on postgiros and vice-versa, so the difference was essentially meaningless and has since disappeared, but it was not always thus. It could be that in Switzerland there is still a tradition for paying things like the phone bill and the electric bill at the post office… particularly the phone bill, since many European post offices were or are connected to the phone company as well.
Germany (and by the sounds of it Switzerland too) are very cash-happy societies, which is why they have these big bills. It’s not unusual to be checking out of a hotel in Germany and see someone settling a weeks bill in cash. At a four or five star hotel, that’s quite a chunk of cash - hence the bills. Japan is apparently the same. My girlfriend used to work the tills at Albert Heijn in Limburg, and even in their small town it wasn’t that unusual to get a €500 note - staff hated them because they usually needed to recash the till after making change, but the whole OMGFTWBBQ we have MONEY in our TILL we will be ROBBED and KILLED :eek: thing does not seem to be such a big worry in these countries.
Oh, and off-topic but if you click on the AH website, look for the ‘work for AH’ bit, and then click on their ‘head office’ building, you get this which certainly makes me want to work for them 
Check out the dude in Tech Support banging his head on the desk…
This always struck me as being a shame, because it was something I saw a few times used as a wedding present.
But I guess I can see the logic in withdrawing it. In today’s electronic world it has almost no legitimate purpose for existing.
I don’t think fear of robbery is the primary reason some places are averse to large bills - after all, they’re happy to take payment for the same total in $20’s. What they’re concerned about is counterfeits.
According to a Reuters story, it’s 53 cm wide - about 21 inches. It’s about the size of an extra large pizza.
They can say they did it “becuse we can” but it’s actually an advertising gimmick. The Canadian mint is famous, and very successful, for its extremely pure, high-quality bullion, and has been one of the world’s premier refining and bullion sources for a long time.
To add to what flodnak said: in Switzerland, instead of sending checks in the mail to pay bills, you can bring the bill and cash to the post office and the postmaster records your payment in your official payment book. You can use this for utility bills, rent, mortgage, etc. I don’t remember ever seeing my father write a check.
I’ve only ever seen a Canadian thouand-dollar note twice in my life. Both times they were behind glass at a coin dealers’.
That’s right Little Nemo. I occasionally withdraw several 1000 CHF bills, for example when paying income tax by means of postgiro. They don’t accept credit cards (just like IRS). Health insurance, phone and electric bills or other regular payments are debited from a bank account.
The largest notes in circulation are the 10000 Singapore Dollar note at todays rate of 2.11116 it is worth £4,736.73 & the 10000 Brunei Dollar note at todays rate of 2.07786 it is worth £4,812.64
The $1,329,063 note.
Last time I was in Singapore, ATM machines had a 2,000-SGD limit, which was about $1,600. I was told that it was even higher at some downtown banks. That’s handy, too.
Here in Germany, people surely are very fond of cash. My parents are a good example: My father flatly refuses to use credit or debit cards altogether (doesn’t even want to get a card for ATMs, he just withdraws money from a teller), and my mother uses them only occasionally. It’s quite common for my father to go to the bank, withdraw a thousand euros in fifties and hundreds in a go, carry them around in his wallet, and use them up for everyday expenses - until he runs out of cash and does the same thing again.
What, me money?
And here I was impressed w/ the 5,000 ruble notes in Russia, about $150 at the current exchange rate. (They also have several notes on the other extreme, with the 5 ruble note being worth less than a quarter. And then there’s the kopeck… though I see that they are being phased out… and so are the 5 and 10 ruble notes! This puts our lowest denomination, the $1 bill, well below the lowest Russian denomination.)