I go through a lot of $2 bills. One clerk yesterday turned it over, saw the full-width engraving of the Signing of the Declaration, and said “I lovvvvve these!” a little too enthusiastically.
I played it cool: “It’s all about the Jeffersons, bay-bay…”
Better question, what kind of a name is Salmon???
Is actually any worse than Grover?
We can only scratch our heads in wonder at some 19th-Century given names. There was a Preserved Fish in New York at the turn of the 19th Century; his family later produced United States Congressman Hamilton Fish, much reviled by FDR as a thorn in his side.
Maybe so. But how likely are you to get one in change? That, to my way of thinking, is the true indicator of whether a coin or bill is in circulation.
Heh, I just thought of something: suppose they eliminated the one-dollar bill and only minted the coins, but kept the two-dollar bills? I wonder how much they’d get circulated then?
Agreed. Dollar coins have the same issue – a (relatively small) group of people like to use them, but most cash registers lack a “bin” for them, and so, I’d imagine that few retailers regularly keep them in their registers for use as change.
One thing that may be going on is that some small business owners do not report all of their cash earnings to the tax authorites (illegally, I might add, somewhat unnecessarily). Where a business generates a lot of excess cash, they owners have a problem with what to do with the cash, because depositing it would require reporting it (essentially, a money laundering problem). One thing they can do is turn around and buy busines inventory and supplies from warehouse stores that take cash like Costco, rather than commercial suppliers that would require non-cash payment terms (so, for instance, their delivery people don’t handle cash).
In fact, I would suspect that a significant number of people who make large purchases in cash are doing so with unreported cash income. Part of the reason that the government does not want to issue bills greater than $100 is to limit the ease with which people can make transactions outside the tax reporting system. It’s not just big drug dealers and smugglers that need cash, but the local hardware store owner or dentist who underreports cash income.
More to the point, when retailers DO get any, they don’t hand them back out to customers- they go under the cash drawer in the “special” category and stay there until it’s time to send them back to the bank. Seriously, if I bought something and had $3.00 in change coming, and they just happened to have a two-dollar bill and a dollar coin, I doubt I would be given them.
I checked here to compare the 1969 vs 2010 purchasing power of the discontinued bills. If we reintroduced the $500 bill, it’s worth less than $100 was back in 1969. I think we should bring it back.
$100 ('69) = $596 ('10)
$84 ('69) = $500 ('10)
I need to ask my bank about ordering a stack of $2 bills.
The U.S. has never demonetized (officially declared valueless) any currency. If we want to encourage use of dollar coins, we should simply stop printing more $1 bills (they’ll wear out, on average, within two years), and simultaneously give retailers and vending machine operators a date certain by which they should be prepared to regularly deal with the coins.
At my “Y” I regularly use a $5 to buy a sandwich ($2.50 or $3), I get the dollar gold coins as change.
I think it would be wonderful if we had the following regularly in circulation:
NOTES
$500 (maybe)
$100
$50
$20
$10
$5
$2
COINS
1
.50
.25
[Perhaps .10 as an alternative to quarters]
I’d go along with this. I think that we also need to quit minting the penny. I love squished pennies, but the newer ones are clad, and don’t make the best squished coins.
We need to change to printing either the five or two dollar bill as our lowest bill, and minting nickels (note correct spelling) as our lowest coin, and we need to step up our minting of dollar coins. We might consider minting a $2 or $2.50 coin, as well, but that could come later.
Speaking as an ex cashier, we were taught to put the “odd” coins into a bin, and an odd coin was a dollar, half dollar, or any foreign coins. We rarely gave them out as change, unless we were low on change, because for the most part, making change isn’t something you think about, it’s just something you do on autopilot after the first couple of weeks. I usually bought out the odd coins, because I like to collect them.
So how many bins do you folks typically have in the till? Here in Canada, there are bins for $0.01, $0.05, $0.10, $0.25, $1.00 and $2.00 coins. The $0.50 coin is very rare (around here at least) and presumably gets thrown into the ‘oddities’ bin. I seem to see many tills with five bins across, and one is divided back-to-front for $1/$2 coins.
When we eliminated the $1 and $2 bills, that freed up two bins for coins. Today at the food store, I noticed bins for $5, $10, and $20 bills; the lady in front of me paid with a $50, and the cashier stuck it under the $20 bills.
I’ve noticed that with the two-dollar bill you have bills starting with the one-dollar worth approximately twice as much as the next lowest one up to $100. Is this by design?
Why do you think large bills are good?
The number of people who need them and would use them decrease every year as electronic movement of money increases. Large bills are of value to crooks and counterfeiters and practically worthless to everybody else. So why have them in the system?
Now that I think about it some more, I don’t care much one way or the other about larger bills. I thought it was interesting that a 1969 $500 is worth <$100 now. i just wish the $50 was more readily accepted.
I was amazed to get 50c pieces in Las Vegas from the Casinos- they had JFK on them, IIRC. I didn’t know they existed but evidently they do and they’re legal tender.
The U.S. Mint doesn’t mint many of them anymore (and, according to the Wikipedia article, they’re now primarily minted for collectors now), but they are still legal tender. I’ll see maybe one a year, always as change from a purchase (undoubtedly from a clerk who wants to get rid of the half-dollar someone gave to him! 
) Most U.S. vending machines won’t accept them.