I always thought it was either an unsanctioned brothel, or the girls - or their pimp - didn’t pay their protection money to Potter’s crooked cops that week.
Uncle Billy came in the house with a big basket already filled with cash. Then dozens of townsfolk are coming in, throwing down cash and leaving willy-nilly. Nobody was keeping track of who actually donated, and how much. All the clerk was doing was using an adding machine to total up all the loot. It would have been virtually impossible to accurately give back everyone their money.
I think George would have invested it back into the town in some public way, Maybe built a park or something, I don’t know, and announce that it was made possible by the surplus of everybody’s generous donations.
Kickboxing, sport of the future
Detail: invested in cable TV, created a league, held PPV rights for MMA, lobby for legalized gambling
Perhaps he might have created the Bedford Falls Community Fund to be used for assisting people in need.
And perhaps the people of Bedford Falls encouraged George to finally take that trip around the world he wanted to take earlier, except with Mary this time. Though in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it’s perhaps not the best time to do so. And actually, in the real world, the post-war period was when America had a huge housing shortage, and people like Abraham Levitt got rich building basic but serviceable housing. So perhaps George and his brother did the same thing?
I guess:
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career.
could describe the B&L business. For some meanings of “process”.
I had another thought about IAWL that I’d never before considered: George Bailey, as of the end of the movie, now knows without a doubt that God, Heaven and guardian angels exist. It’s one thing to have faith (not that I would know; I haven’t had anything resembling faith in a very long time), but to know, to have had the existence of a whole supernatural plane above our mortal realm incontrovertibly revealed to you by a guardian angel who altered the very fabric of existence to make a point, would be a heavy existential burden for a human to bear.
What do you do with that new knowledge? Do you tell anybody? Does George maybe just tell Mary? Or does he tell the whole town? Does he end up in the Bedford Falls Asylum as a result (no doubt owned by Potter and run under ‘Snake Pit’ conditions)?
Also, now you know for certain that God, Joseph, your guardian angel, and who knows how many other Heavenly entities, are watching and judging every move you make-- every bathroom trip, surreptitious nose-pick, and bedroom activity. Probably observing your most private thoughts as well. Pretty damn creepy.
And where was Potter’s guardian angel, to show him the error of his ways? Didn’t he need a guardian angel intervention most of all? Maybe he had already gotten the Three Spirits deluxe treatment and it just didn’t take. He was arguably more evil than Scrooge-- perhaps he was beyond saving.
That way lies MADNESS!
OK, so it took a whole town of people praying for George for Joseph* and God (? imdb says “senior angel”) to become alerted to the Situation. Yet, SA says “George Bailey? Yes! Tonight’s his crucial night.” So they already know. Does that mean everything is predetermined? Or can angels simply “see” the most likely of possible futures?
I would assume they get a lot of prayers for Potter, but most likely they won’t honor “drop dead” as a valid prayer request.
There are a lot of people deserving** to have their prayers answered. Too bad Mr Gower didn’t have any friends when he “killed that kid”. Or Mr Martini, when he lost his home, his business and maybe his family. Or Ernie when his wife left him. Or Ma and Pa Bailey, when they lost their only son. If George had accepted his alternate reality, wouldn’t that all have stayed?
Even in the real world, the true timeline, God is very selective on who he helps. Best just to take the movie at surface value. More enjoyable that way. 
* And was it supposed to be the Joseph, adoptive father and cuckhold? Or just some Joseph? I always thought the former. Poor guy gets sidelined by history, least they can do is give him some sinecure.
** Like in Groundhog Day. The common thinking is that Phill got The Treatment so he would become a better man. Trouble is, there are a lot of people that also need that treatment. I don’t even think Phil is close to being the worst, even in Punxsutawney, let alone the whole world. Hello? Ned? Ned Ryerson? BING!
I KNOW!
I…don’t think I can go back to taking the movie at surface value anymore. Maybe I never should have started this post-- I’ve let the Genie out of the bottle. I’ve picked at a thread on the Sweater of Sanity, and there’s no going back for me…
Well, if you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, then that alternate George-free reality had already existed, and continued to do so after George returned to his reality. Also there’d be a reality where George took off to South America right after college, or other parts distant, and had a fine old time. Maybe he took Violet Bic with him (is it Bic, or Bick, as @crowmanyclouds spelled it, I wonder? I always imagined her as the estranged heiress to the Bic pen and lighter fortune 
).
And also, a reality where George took Mary’s initial advice to ignore the bank run on their honeymoon, and they took off with their fistful of marriage cash and never returned.
I always assumed Joseph the favorite son of Jacob, founder of the Israelite Tribe of Joseph, of ‘Technicolor Dreamcoat’ fame, not the stepdad of Jesus who was cuckolded by God, myself.
But from George’s POV, couldn’t everything he experienced be chalked up to some kind of scary dream or nervous breakdown while standing on a bridge during a snowstorm? He doesn’t exactly have any proof of anything supernatural, although I guess the book signed by some guy named Clarence might be tough to explain.
George did resist Clarence’s claim to be his guardian angel and the new Georgeless alt-verse for a considerable part of the movie, imagining Clarence to be some old nut job at first, then asking if Clarence has hypnotized him. But at the end, he seems to have accepted the reality of it.
But I think you do have something there-- as time went on, the existential burden of the reality of it would have been too much for his mortal mind, and he would have eventually convinced himself It Was All A Dream and went on with his life.
This is quite likely. After time passes, when God goes back to letting us all live in the hell of our own making, when Zuzu gets polio and Tommy starts wearing dresses* and Mary believes the rumors about Georgie and Violet and goes home to Mother, George will begin to doubt that any of the events of Christmas Eve 1945 ever really happened. He’ll start drinking and despair and he’ll die an old lonely man from driving drunk and taking a bus load of orphans with him.
And then on judgement day, the mean old God of the Old Testament will roar down “I SHOWED YOU MY GLORY AND POWER, YET YOU REFUSE TO BELIEVE!” And he gets sent to the plain of suicides (because deep down he really wanted to die) and spends eternity as a gnarly tree, wishing he could get another chance to believe. Alas, no. One per customer, offer void where prohibited and in California.
* not that there’s anything wrong with that. Except in Bedford Falls in the 50s. At least it isn’t too far to Greenwich Village.
Bailey’s kids formed the Jesus and Mary Chain
Yeah…
One of his personalities saw that Puca as mentioned earlier. Plus, he saw a murder in his apt complex and knows who REALLY shot Liberty Valance. He was indeed the man who knew too much…
Well, Wikipedia says “Bick”, FWIW. I used to think it was “Bigg” or “Biggs”. But that was on a cheap B&W Tv and tinny speaker.
I subscribe to the “only one world at a time, but they can change” view of quantum reality, and there is no true"reality". They are all equally valid. Just only one at a time. 
The other way is too … pointless. If everything everywhere can happen all at once, then why care about any one reality? Because the reality where a cast iron trolley hit me square in the head instead of missing is out there too, and my folks cried over my death. Why is this reality “truer” than that one?
So if George kills himself again, instead of praying to go back, then the world would stay as it is. And Clarence would be assigned to cleaning out the trash cans in heaven’s offices. Forever.
My estranged Bic pen heiress theory still holds up, with a little modification. I did 2 minutes of research and learned that Marcel Bich started the Bic pen company in Paris in 1942. My new theory: his wife had already left him with their infant daughter years before he started the Bic company, and fled to America. She kept her married name but changed it to ‘Bick’, since the American pronunciation of ‘Bich’ was problematic (probably the same reason Marcel Bich named his company ‘Bic’). Despite leaving him, he paid her a stipend to live comfortably in America and raise their daughter well. But at some point, perhaps he cut off the stipend, or the mother refused to give any of the money to Violet. Violet did seem to dress very fashionably, despite needing money from George. Were those possibly some outfits that were once the latest Paris fashions?
Exactly. Best not to think too closely about it, because, as you say, that way lies MADNESS 
I knew an Episcopal priest who liked to say, “God answers every prayer, but sometimes the answer is ‘No.’”
Yeah, He isn’t always “loving” and “compassionate.”