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In reply to the discussion: School Calls Police on Girl Using 2 Dollar Bill to Buy Her Chicken Nuggets! It Gets Worse! [View all]DFW
(54,850 posts)I work with many banks overseas, and I often get asked to take $2 bills, Susan Anthony Dollars and Eisenhower Dollars back to the States. I just spend them, although I get odd looks, especially from younger sales personnel who weren't even born when these things were put into circulation. I find it insulting, though, that people trained to work as a cashier are not even told what is legal tender in the USA (which includes all federal coins and banknotes since 1792, by the way), and sometimes treat money with skepticism. I should also add that I have been treated with frowns (though never threats of arrest) for spending $2 bills, Anthony dollars, Eisenhower dollars and even Kennedy half dollars this past summer in Massachusetts, California, Virginia and even Washington, DC. Less so in Texas, although the presence of the largest coin dealership in the country in Dallas probably makes this less likely to happen in Dallas than elsewhere in the state. Funnily enough, the sales people who least knew what they were looking at--the summer interns on Cape Cod from Eastern Europe (Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Lithuania, etc)--were the most accepting of the fact that there were things in America that they had never known about. It was the European-Americans in California and Virginia that gave me the most WTF comments.
This doesn't happen just in the USA, by the way. The Germans used to put out one 5 D-Mark commemorative coin after another in the 1990s. I once tried to pay with one at an open-air market in our town, and the young sales girl haughtily tossed it back in my face and said "this is not ours." I then went "right back at ya," and asked her if she was Turkish or Polish. She got really huffy at that one, and the owner of the stand, who knew me well, came over to see what the problem was. She showed him the coin and "accused me" of wanting to pay with it. Being a coin collector, himself, he instantly recognized it for what it was, thanked me profusely (to the girl's great consternation), and that was that. Well, almost anyway. She insisted on telling me she was German. I said, "you can't be. You just told me a German coin was not from your country." She suddenly found it urgent that she serve another customer.
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