I'm at Lowes today getting some material for work and used my business debit card. I decide I want a soda. So I grab one out of the cooler and check out again, same person. I hand over a $1 and $2. She send them through this little "scanner". Who checks a $1? Anyway, the $2 fails the test. She tries another and it fails as well. At this point I'm done with the whole thing and leave. I got a soda down the road with no issue. Really???
Maybe try The Home Depot? Yea, I know, I hate them also. You mean one of these Beauties? Try one of these sometime... LOL. Hey! I thought that the customer was always right.
The problem with any piece of technology is that it is no better than the specifications. Conceivably worse, but certainly no better. It's a sad by-product of agile and the "minimum viable product" concept. If the specs didn't call out a $2, just the $1, $5, $10, and $20 - maybe not even the older 20s. As I often say (being in IT), the requirements didn't SAY the dumpster couldn't be on fire. It's a free added feature! If you don't want it on fire, file a change request.
I've made many two dollar electronic payments to my credit card all the time .. never rejected!! lol Too many people have never seen a $2 bill and many times they'll get one as a Christmas present (at least the bank told me that). It doesn't surprise me an electronic checker doesn't recognize it.
When WF dropped their coin counting machine a few years back my wife started using all my $.50 CRH rejects for buying Powerballs and MegaMillions (when the numbers get big) at the local Speedway (ex-SuperAmerica, maybe soon to be 7-11) gas station. It took a while, but eventually all the employees took them without comment (or tracking down whoever was playing manager that day). Some of them would get excited when they saw my wife coming (I honestly believe that they were swapping them out for "regular" money because they had never seen them before and were collecting them).
Hi Group, When I was going through my Flea Market days and setting up in deep East Texas both buyers and sellers there would not accept 2$ bills. One of the folks explained that they thought them unlucky..? J.T.
When I was working in a bank in Alabama in the 1960s, we'd frequently get $2 bills with one or more, sometimes 4 corners torn off. We'd have to send them back to the Fed as mutilated. I was told that they were widely believed to be unlucky, but it was also believed that by tearing the corner off the "bad luck" would run out!
Recently, I have been spending some older $10 and $20 bills. Not nice enough to hold on to. Most people have taken them and the self checkouts are about 50/50 with them. All of the self checkouts around me will take a $2 and some will take half dollars.
Different manufacturers made different tradeoffs. One of the things that sank the dollar coins was cash drawers with just 5 compartments... 1c 5c 10c 25c and one for rolls. No room for the half dollar or dollar coins. The ones paid in get dropped into some overflow and don't get paid out. Vicious cycle of "nobody wants them" because there is no easy way to spend them. It should be obvious to program a cash acceptor for all the coins and bills that could be used. But.... obvious and reality often disconnect.
The poor $2 bill. When they did circulate more widely in the mid-20th century, they were considered bad luck, so people would tear their corners off to "repel" the curse. I had never seen this phenomenon in person until I inherited a pile of old bills from a now long deceased relative. Amongst an assortment of some pretty decent mid-20th century bills sat the sad torn 1953 $2 below with all its corners missing. Another one in the same pile had just one corner torn. I'm not sure why those particular torn examples were packed away with the others. Now the poor $2 bill suffers from outright neglect and abuse. No one believes it actually exists, apparently including whoever created that scanning machine mentioned in the OP. Not only that, as discussed on this forum in the past, a few people using $2 bills have even had the police called on them for attempting to pass a counterfeit. That's pretty insane. This type has gone into absolute obscurity, but yet a number of them still roll off the presses. So things have gone from bad to worse with the poor $2 bill. Sigh.
I’ve always been told that the $2.00 with torn corns have nothing to do with bad luck. The banks handed them out and people with poor eye sight tore the corners off to tell the difference between a $1.00 and a $2.00 bill. That was a lot of money back then and money was scarce.
Hmmmm... Seems quite unlikely. What did the banks do to distinguish the $5, $10, $20, $50, & $100 bills for those with poor eyesight? Each of those were even a lot MORE money.
Nothing good. There was a lawsuit and consent decree that requires the US to improve. But very little action on differentiating currency has occured.
@SensibleSal66 Maybe "Hey! I thought that the customer was always right." Not so. Actually one should reply: "I am always the customer..."
And of course the most common version of that statement is "The customer is always right in matters of taste." "Putting that flowered couch together with the paisley chairs? I would never have thought of that combinatio. Bless your heart."
The current generation of self-checkout machines seem happy enough to accept halves, but I don't think any of them will take Ikes (the slots aren't even big enough), and I haven't yet found one that will accept $2 bills.
My kid worked a food truck and they had stacks of $2 bills in the till for change. I think a lot of their items were $11 and $13 so it was easier. Until this thread I had never heard of a $2 bill being bad luck. Maybe it's a regional thing.
