At the show I tendered the coin in partial payment for a $3.25 (grrr.......)
cup of Pepsi, and the concessionnaire said, "What is this, a dollar?" I
told him no, it's a half dollar, and that the government produces millions
of them a year, but that they do not circulate. He philosophically observed
that at a coin show, all kinds of weird coins are presented for payment.
But he continued to show signs that I was handing him a line of bovine
residue. I wonder how many New Jersey coppers he gets at a typical
three-day show.
James
In my teens when I had a cashier job, if I got a half (other than a nice
Walking Liberty) I foisted it on the next customer who received more than 50
cents in change. I hated them because there was no coin slot for them.
Yesterday in a fast food drive-through I paid my $2 tab with four Kennedies.
The two clerks at the register conferred for a good half-minute before one
announced "These are dollars, right?" and tried to hand two of them back to
me. Fortunately for them, I just smiled and informed them of their true
value.
Now just a darned minute there, you're not *that* much younger than I, and
when *I* was a boy, there were five slots for coins in the standard
register: cents, two cents, three cents, nickels, dimes, and...oh, wait,
never mind.
James the Ag�d
Heh, heh. In the tills that did have five slots, the last one usually was
filled with rolls of cents and quarters, which were the coins most commonly
dispensed in change. I once had my money count short by fifty cents - until
the manager found a half hiding under the rolls.
Ditto for $2 bills. I unloaded them ASAP because there was no bills slot
for them. If you put them under the ones and no one caught it, you could
end up $1 short in the count. If you put them under the twenties you could
end up $18 over.
So how did you handle the mills and fractional bills in your tills?
I put them in my pocket and kept a tally of hash marks on a tiny slip of
paper.
And it's true what they say about those large cents, how they used to get
real nasty and greasy and smelly.
James the Disinfected
"Hash" marks and mushrooms and altered states, oh my! This exchange is
morphing into something that anyone who remembers that era couldn't have
lived through it.
Obligatory on-topic references: nickel lids, dime bags, and currency rolled
into snorting tubes.
> And it's true what they say about those large cents, how they used to get
> real nasty and greasy and smelly.
>
> James the Disinfected
Have you ever been tendered a damp, smelly bill wadded down to the size of a
postage stamp that obviously had been removed only moments before from
secreted storage somewhere on the purchaser's female person? Blech! I'll
take the nastiest copper you ever got over that any day.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh the 'ole half is a buck mistake. Clerks in my hood are
pretty acclimated to the halves now, but there was quite a few times I
had to correct them. Just one got by as I noticed (when I got home)
they mistook the half for a buck. Wasn't wasting a few bucks in gas
to correct their error. I once had a $2 ring up as a $20 but the
clerk realized the goof pretty quickly. Not sure what the books
looked like when the $2 transaction emulated a $20 one on the receipt.
Only had one clerk ask a manager if they accepted halves. More often
it happens on the $2's.
OZ, going to the bank Tuesday to replenish his $0.50 and $2 supply.