Snopes has a page on two dollar bills, and several of the legends mentioned so far in this thread are discussed briefly there. samclem, how often would you run into bills with multiple corners torn off? The Snopes article says that some people would tear off additional corners for each new owner of the bill.
Leaffan, this thread is discussing an old tradition. I wouldn’t be surprised if it migrated across the border. Care to chime in on whether you’ve ever heard about that happening? If not, that’s fine, I’ll just ask my Canadian boyfriend’s parents, since they’re of the right generation to know. If I can stop stuffing my mouth with Big Mac’s long enough. MmmMMMmmm…
I was going to ask a question, but a google search gave me the answer I had been looking for, and I figured I’d share.
I had once heard that all new $2 bills originate from the Federal Reserve Bank that supplies Las Vegas, which is the only city where they’re commonly seen and used. This turns out to be false. Google image search shows notes at least from Federal Reserve banks B, C, F, I and L. This is a large enough spread that I would expect all of them still disperse the bills, though likely not in equal amounts.
As far as I know, you can simply go to a bank and ask for a stack of them. You might also go to the service counter of any type of retail store that handles a lot of cash transactions; they would tend to accumulate them because while they’re only occassionally recieved, they’re rarely given back as change.
I dont understand all the hoopla over Two Dollar Bills!! All you have to do is go to your bank and you can cash and entire check in nothing but 2 Dollar bills!! Where do people get these ridiculous ideas about them? I think, right now, I have about 60 of them sitting on my desk and they are all printed in 2004. They never stopped making them, they are not rare or collectors items, and they are not worth more than 2 dollars. They are just another denomination of money.
Whenever I buy anything with US Dollars, it’s always stacks of 2s. The only US Cash I use is either Sackie Dollars or 2 Dollar bills!! Koreans call the 2s, “Lucky Money” and they’re almost always happy to get one.
I actually was told that in many communities, $2 was the cost of a night in a bording house and 2 meals, and if you had $2 on your person, you couldn’t be arrested for vagrancy, which dates to the deep south during the depression. Apparently, vagrancy carried with it a several month stretch breaking rocks on a chain gang. I would assume that the possession of omoney meant that you were an honest person traveling around and looking for work, not a bum looking for a handout or caual theft.
My mother gave me a $2 bill when I moved out of the family home to go to university. She said it was so I never went broke. The superstition went out the window for me because as a student, I was always living from paycheck to paycheck. I never did use that $2 bill. In fact, it’s inside my wallet now, 15 years later.
Well, not on the Prairies. We just didn’t use the two-spot. People wouldn’t take it in change. When I worked retail, if we ever did get a two, it went straight to the bank in that day’s deposit. We only kept ones and fives. If someone paid with a two, it was usually a sign that they’d come from B.C. or Ontario.
Why? I dunno. Quirk of the Prairies, I guess. I heard many of the same explanations that others have repeated, but the two most common were that twos were bad luck, and that “we don’t use them on the Prairies” - sort of a regional identifier.
I also saw the twos with the corner ripped off - “to let the bad luck out.” One explanation I heard for the bad luck was that “deuce” was a nickname/euphemism for the devil (as in, “what the deuce!”).
Twos only were common on the Prairies when the loonie was introduced, and the two became the smallest bill available. Then they disappeared again when the twoonie came in.
I’ve got a two-dollar bill in my wallet now, for the last year. I teach a Boy Scouts Coin Collecting merit badge, and it’s handy to have in case someone wants the badge on short notice (like last Sunday) when I wouldn’t have time to go to the bank to get another one. I’ve never had a problem spending one.
It’s the only bill my kids won’t take out of my wallet (yes, they ask first). Maybe I should find an ATM that gives out only two-dollar bills…
When I was a kid my dad told me that you should always carry two dollars in your wallet, or you may be arrested for vagrancy. He grew up during the Great Depression. This was a time when California prevented Freedom of Travel by barring ‘Okies’ from entering unless they had money. Maybe that’s where he got the idea?
Lucky vs. unlucky
Where I used to work was very near Little Siagon, so many of my workmates were Vietnamese. For good luck, some of them received a $2 bill in a red envelope on Chinese New Year. But other Vietnamese coworkers told me that carrying a two-dollar note in your wallet is bad luck, and that one should spend it as quickly as possible.
I’d never heard any of this folklore about the $2 bill. Fascinating!
In the little Ohio River town where I grew up, a well-regarded older gentleman would get a stack of $2 bills from the bank, take it to a print shop and have it gummed along the upper edge. He’d carry them in a leather case (like a checkbook), and tear them off as tips in restaurants, or as gifts for little kids. The $2 bill is uncommon enough, and this method of dispensing them is certainly rare enough, he loved the double-take he would get when he’d tear them off.
I heard a commedian (I think – I may have read it here) say that he would buy sheets of $2 bills and cut them into strips. He’d glue the strips together and roll them into a wad. He said he carried the roll of notes and a scissors with him, and would pull off the requisite number of notes for his dinner bill (or whatever) and snip them off.
Personally, I’d like to have a $2 note, a Sackie, a Suzie, a silver dollar, a paper dollar, and a 50¢ piece and use them to buy something.
The tradition didn’t migrate–in Ontario, we used $2 bills every day, so sometimes you’d have a $2 in your wallet, and sometimes you didn’t. Although as Northern Piper notes, they weren’t popular everywhere. Never had a problem with them in Ontario though.
Still, in Ontario, I don’t recall anybody having a $2 bill in their wallet for any reason other than they would eventually use it to buy something with. I used them often enough, and saw many $2 bills pass through my till when I worked retail years ago.
In the US at least, the expression "queer as a three dollar bill"was the common one. Since three dollar bills(issued by private banks) were no longer legal after 1862 in the US, and the fact that the US government never printed a three dollar bill, the expression became “queer as a three dollar bill.”
A nice little touch in Chinatown is when Jake Gittes (Nicholson) is rifling through a suspect’s wallet, and we glimpse for just a second the corner of a $2 bill.
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