Basically, no. But I’ll take this opportunity to share that I spent a few months dealing blackjack in a casino, where I got kind of blasé about handling $100 bills.
It’s a yes or no question, and my answer is “no”… in fact I can’t remember my first encounter with any particular denomination or currency. (Well, except Bitcoin.)
Now I’m actually wondering at what point in my formative years did I even learn the concept of money? I wonder what I thought of it at the time. Both the concept and the physical coins and bills. Did I previous believe that my parents just went out and took stuff? Did I have some innate knowledge that a medium of exchange was a useful mechanism and I didn’t think further of it?
I do remember my mom telling me money is dirty and not to put it in my mouth. So maybe my initial reaction to “mommy uses money to buy food” was… “money is food”.
@awk I remember finding my first silver coin in the “wild”. I cashed my first paycheck at Walmart from working part time at the Boy Scout camp and got a silver 1964 quarter.
@awk I remember it being obvious that a quarter was worth more than a dime, because it was bigger. The nickel vs dime was vexing to me (as was dime vs penny). I’m sure most kids go through that, but I was probably like 18 or something, which made shopping awkward.
nickel costs more than copper. The .gov has been talking about reformulating nickels because the metal cost is so close to face value (and in the late 2000s when commodity prices spiked, a nickel was worth more than face value).
Yes, my Dad sold a old Renault for $600. He called all of us kids (6 of us) into the Living Room and let us each hold one of the $100 bills. I was probably 6 or 7 and had no real concept of how much it was other than ‘a lot’.
My dad kept couple folded really small crammed into the back of his wallet for emergencies. No one not even my mom knew he kept them. I missed a car payment on my first car after a wreck waiting for insurance money after a wreck, right before I shipped to basic. He pulled them out of there to keep my car from getting repoed while I waited. Those things were old. Heck they might have been silver certificates.
@Jasonf1984 when i was in college, on the rare occasion i had a hundred i’d fold it up and put it in one of the little compartments of my wallet.
One day i had been broke for a couple of days and for some reason was poking around my wallet and i found a hundred i had tucked away. Holy shit was I rich! I just had to find somewhere that would break it for me, which meant a trip to walmart to buy a pack of gum.
1965… First hundred dollar paycheck… I had to work almost 80 hours to achieve it… My wife and I had a ball spending it on rent, food, movies full tank of gas and gifts to relatives and one another with money left over. What a week…!!
The first car I purchased. I went to the bank, withdrew my money and handed the guy 5 crisp $100.00 bills. Even though it was a used car… writing this out makes me feel old.
Eleven years old.
Hanging out at my best friend’s house. We wanted to walk to the local burger joint to split some chili cheese fries. I had 60 cents and my friend had a wadded up buck and change so we went to his dad, who was chilling in the back yard. He was mid twelve-pack after working his regular 18 hour day. Told us to grab a few dollars from his wallet. We found the wallet on the kitchen counter and my friend spilled the contents out. There were no ones, no fives, not even tens. Just a half-inch thick stack of mostly $20 bills and at LEAST ten $100s.
We each got our own fries.
My brother and I were pretty young and my grandfather and a buddy of his dumped out a brown paper grocery bag full of stacks of $100 bills on the table in front of us. We were in total awe! I was about 8 yrs old. It was several yrs later I began to wonder about ties in the mob.
When the first episode of The Soprano’s came out and I was then living in the south for many yrs, I was enthralled with the very first episode because it reminded me a lot of my childhood and surroundings. It was quite nostalgic for me at the first.
I later found out that he was not in the mob (according to my mom…although several of the others were) but apparently my grandmother had an affair with a mafioso and got pregnant and terminated and my grandfather was a target for a while (or at least he thought so and never went unarmed after that). But I’ll always remember those bundles of $100 bills piled on and covering that kitchen table.
And I’ve never publicly told that story before.
@lseeber Wow. That’s interesting! Thanks for sharing… I was driving around randomly one day when I was a teenager and ended up at the house where they film the exterior footage for The Sopranos house. Just thought I’d share that.
I also paid for my first car with 9 $100 bills. I was 17 and didn’t know to ask for a cashiers check at the bank. Mom looked at me like I was crazy. My first money lesson.
I have one hundred dollar bill. I think it may be the first one that I’ve seen, or nearly the first. I can’t think of any cause I would ever have to obtain more of them, or to spend the one I have.
It’s all cards and automatic transactions, now… phones. I only barely remember purchasing some poptarts (I think it was) in high school, to “break a 20”.
My first experience with a $100 bill came covering for a cashier while she took her break. (I was the stock boy at the local, tiny grocery store.) When the customers left, I pulled it out and looked at it in awe.
The first time I GOT a $100 bill was not long later. I intercepted a drug drop accidentally. Someone left money, so I picked it up. $300… didn’t know what to do with it, so I kept it in my innermost pocket that I didn’t use and they got “laundered”… literally went through the laundry and I had to explain to my mother where they came from. (We were poor, she knew they weren’t ours!)
The specific circumstances no, but I do at least know it would have been when working as a cashier in one of the gift shops of the local amusement park which was later bought by 6 flags.
I found one on the floor of a department store when I was very young and my mom made me give it to their lost and found. I would be willing to bet one of the employees pocketed it.
Somebody brought $6500 cash to our house to buy a car my dad had listed in the paper. Dad was REALLY uncomfortable having that wad of bills in the house overnight.
@whogots i once carried $25,000 in cash from my personal bank to a different bank so i could start a business account. In my head everyone on the road was out to murder me. I’ve never been so nervous in my life.
@Kabn Something to do with the timing… We were planning on making some big purchases asap. The new bank said they would have to wait on the cashier’s check to clear (isn’t that the whole point of a cashier’s check?) or some other dumbness that made us decide the best way to handle this and have the funds available was to bring them fat stacks of cash.
@chienfou Oh, mine wasn’t $25K, more like $6K. But I did get a different bank to do the same for closing out my personal accounts (~$15K). Cashier’s checks fees are basically all margin, and if they know you have at least some money to throw around, it’s easy to give the pitch of “Well, waiving this fee would really show you value my patronage and might make me more likely to come back if things change.” Any personal banker can waive them.
@djslack Yeah, that sounds about right. My ex was in item processing at a bank, and if something tripped one of the exception rules, they had to put a multi-day hold on it, even if it was a certified/cashier’s check. Even branch managers couldn’t bypass it. People got super pissed.
@lseeber if you take that much cash (>10k) into or out of a bank, you have triggered a paper trail. This is specifically called for by the usa patriot act although that may not be the only rule that requires it.
My mother helped run the booster club at my high school, which entailed us running the concession stand at football games. One parent always paid for <$10 purchases with $100 bills, and it annoyed everyone who worked the till. Later, it came out the guy was in trouble for not paying his taxes.
My high school job was stocker/cashier at PetsMart. We saw an uptick in $100 bill usage on Fridays and Saturdays, assumedly because that’s when weekly payroll hit and people who didn’t have bank accounts took large bills. It sucked to have to call a lead to break one early in the day when I had a 6+ person line.
In fact, I’m not so sure I’ve ever personally had a $100 bill of my own money. All my vehicle/property purchases have been checks and of values that wouldn’t make sense to pay out in cash. I don’t gamble at casinos, and I rarely carry cash, period.
Random: a coworker of mine was a collector of some kind (coin, semi-precious stones?), and he never knew when he was going to find a deal. So he routinely carried between $3,000 and $4,000 on his person or in his vehicle.
Back in the day, when another guy and I did home repairs/remodeling locally we occasionally got paid by folks with C notes. Always a PITA to use due to many of the above mentioned problems… and bringing them to the bank in sufficient quantities would get you questioning looks…
I always tried to use them places that had reasonable resources so I wouldn’t “break the bank” at their register. Of course 20+ yrs ago it took more groceries than it does now and buying gas didn’t cut it either.
I think my very first was graduation day from grade school. I had an uncle who was pretty well-to-do; he put a $100 bill in my graduation card but with a note that it was to help pay for books in (private) high school. Earmarked! I got to hold it but my parents took it and used it for books… sigh.
(Tl;dr version:
yes, everywhere, due to money counting machines. Tiny tiny amounts tho. A few millionths of a gram in a single bill.
The new UK £5 note is slightly stiffened, due to techie currency paper upgrades.
And it’s slick paper. So people are using it to consume drugs. Only: the paper is stiff enough to cause many small cuts inside the nose. Which people often can’t feel, due to coke’s anesthetic properties.
So now they can destroy their noses even faster than the old way, I guess.
The note has Churchill’s pix on it.
(I thought all the UK currency had the Queen’s image? Guess not, anymore.)
Anyway, when cokeheads cut their noses that way, they call it " getting Winston’d".
The article also contains thoughts from headshop personnel, currency experts, and drug dealers who were interviewed.
Re: tallow in currency paper:
Simon Round – a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews – telling the BBC that “the five pound notes wouldn’t cause any problem to Jews unless they try to eat them”.
More fun with the new UK currency:
The currency paper contains small amounts of tallow, likely from cattle or sheep.
Many people don’t like this. And I understand. I might not like it much were I there.
Ethical and animal-use related reasons aside, supposedly all the UK currency in circulation contains in sum and toto the tallow from about 1/2 cow.
I saw a off center star 100 dollar bill the other day.
https://imgur.com/a/gOtOM
@clonetek
Defective bills and coins are very valuable to collectors. Not sure about this one, but some coins can be worth hundred of thousands.
@clonetek You still have it? If so get that thing appraised…
@clonetek I check star notes to lists online. Ya never know… Yours, they made 3,072,000 of them. An off-center one? Cool.
No, I don’t remember.
@cengland0
But only “yes” answers to pick from?
I saved it under my mattress for years.
My siblings and I traded all our ones and fives in for two $100 bills so we could go buy a Nintendo 64!
No to the poll question, but I remember the issue of Archie where Veronica kept trying to pay for things with a $1,000 bill she thought was a $1 bill.
Basically, no. But I’ll take this opportunity to share that I spent a few months dealing blackjack in a casino, where I got kind of blasé about handling $100 bills.
Can someone send me a $100 bill so I can have a good memory?
@cengland0 I’m sure I could dig one up for you. Do you prefer doctor, dentist or phone bills?
It’s a yes or no question, and my answer is “no”… in fact I can’t remember my first encounter with any particular denomination or currency. (Well, except Bitcoin.)
Now I’m actually wondering at what point in my formative years did I even learn the concept of money? I wonder what I thought of it at the time. Both the concept and the physical coins and bills. Did I previous believe that my parents just went out and took stuff? Did I have some innate knowledge that a medium of exchange was a useful mechanism and I didn’t think further of it?
I do remember my mom telling me money is dirty and not to put it in my mouth. So maybe my initial reaction to “mommy uses money to buy food” was… “money is food”.
@awk I remember finding my first silver coin in the “wild”. I cashed my first paycheck at Walmart from working part time at the Boy Scout camp and got a silver 1964 quarter.
@awk I remember it being obvious that a quarter was worth more than a dime, because it was bigger. The nickel vs dime was vexing to me (as was dime vs penny). I’m sure most kids go through that, but I was probably like 18 or something, which made shopping awkward.
@mehcuda67 Nickels are worth more than dimes. Current melt value of the component metals:
nickel (75% copper, 25% nickel) $0.0412598
clad dime (not silver) (91.67% copper, 8.33% nickel) $0.0166261
nickel costs more than copper. The .gov has been talking about reformulating nickels because the metal cost is so close to face value (and in the late 2000s when commodity prices spiked, a nickel was worth more than face value).
Yes, my Dad sold a old Renault for $600. He called all of us kids (6 of us) into the Living Room and let us each hold one of the $100 bills. I was probably 6 or 7 and had no real concept of how much it was other than ‘a lot’.
@jwilloughby Your Dad must have been quite the salesman. Not sure I’d want to spend $600 for a new Renault.
nope, plus what @awk said
No.
My dad kept couple folded really small crammed into the back of his wallet for emergencies. No one not even my mom knew he kept them. I missed a car payment on my first car after a wreck waiting for insurance money after a wreck, right before I shipped to basic. He pulled them out of there to keep my car from getting repoed while I waited. Those things were old. Heck they might have been silver certificates.
@Jasonf1984 when i was in college, on the rare occasion i had a hundred i’d fold it up and put it in one of the little compartments of my wallet.
One day i had been broke for a couple of days and for some reason was poking around my wallet and i found a hundred i had tucked away. Holy shit was I rich! I just had to find somewhere that would break it for me, which meant a trip to walmart to buy a pack of gum.
1965… First hundred dollar paycheck… I had to work almost 80 hours to achieve it… My wife and I had a ball spending it on rent, food, movies full tank of gas and gifts to relatives and one another with money left over. What a week…!!
The first car I purchased. I went to the bank, withdrew my money and handed the guy 5 crisp $100.00 bills. Even though it was a used car… writing this out makes me feel old.
No…I don’t remember!
Eleven years old.
Hanging out at my best friend’s house. We wanted to walk to the local burger joint to split some chili cheese fries. I had 60 cents and my friend had a wadded up buck and change so we went to his dad, who was chilling in the back yard. He was mid twelve-pack after working his regular 18 hour day. Told us to grab a few dollars from his wallet. We found the wallet on the kitchen counter and my friend spilled the contents out. There were no ones, no fives, not even tens. Just a half-inch thick stack of mostly $20 bills and at LEAST ten $100s.
We each got our own fries.
My brother and I were pretty young and my grandfather and a buddy of his dumped out a brown paper grocery bag full of stacks of $100 bills on the table in front of us. We were in total awe! I was about 8 yrs old. It was several yrs later I began to wonder about ties in the mob.
When the first episode of The Soprano’s came out and I was then living in the south for many yrs, I was enthralled with the very first episode because it reminded me a lot of my childhood and surroundings. It was quite nostalgic for me at the first.
I later found out that he was not in the mob (according to my mom…although several of the others were) but apparently my grandmother had an affair with a mafioso and got pregnant and terminated and my grandfather was a target for a while (or at least he thought so and never went unarmed after that). But I’ll always remember those bundles of $100 bills piled on and covering that kitchen table.
And I’ve never publicly told that story before.
@lseeber Wow. That’s interesting! Thanks for sharing… I was driving around randomly one day when I was a teenager and ended up at the house where they film the exterior footage for The Sopranos house. Just thought I’d share that.
@gwrankin Cool!
I found $127 in a wad at a street fair when I was like 7… That was a pretty cool day… (No hundy in there though)
Yes, I took money out of the bank to buy my first car for 400 bucks.
I also paid for my first car with 9 $100 bills. I was 17 and didn’t know to ask for a cashiers check at the bank. Mom looked at me like I was crazy. My first money lesson.
/giphy no
I never thought I grew up that well off, but my dad always got a couple of $100’s when he cashed his paycheck.
I recall my father usually had a few in his Italian money clip.
Just to note, I’ve seen plenty since and may have a stash of them.
@cinoclav …wait… you MAY have a stash of C notes around but you’re not sure???
Need anyone to come over and clean your house while you’re at work???
@chienfou Actually yes. But they may be stashed in a safe deposit box.
so far, the most common answer, no matter what the poll says seems to be ‘NO’… which gets my vote also.
I have one hundred dollar bill. I think it may be the first one that I’ve seen, or nearly the first. I can’t think of any cause I would ever have to obtain more of them, or to spend the one I have.
It’s all cards and automatic transactions, now… phones. I only barely remember purchasing some poptarts (I think it was) in high school, to “break a 20”.
I got paid. Then I discovered what a pain in the ass it was to get change for a $100. Thank goodness for direct deposit.
My first experience with a $100 bill came covering for a cashier while she took her break. (I was the stock boy at the local, tiny grocery store.) When the customers left, I pulled it out and looked at it in awe.
The first time I GOT a $100 bill was not long later. I intercepted a drug drop accidentally. Someone left money, so I picked it up. $300… didn’t know what to do with it, so I kept it in my innermost pocket that I didn’t use and they got “laundered”… literally went through the laundry and I had to explain to my mother where they came from. (We were poor, she knew they weren’t ours!)
No because I’m old enough that a hundred dollars was way more than anyone would give as a gift for a special occasion.
You asked a yes or no question and didn’t include no as one of the answers. Come on, meh.
The specific circumstances no, but I do at least know it would have been when working as a cashier in one of the gift shops of the local amusement park which was later bought by 6 flags.
I found one on the floor of a department store when I was very young and my mom made me give it to their lost and found. I would be willing to bet one of the employees pocketed it.
Somebody brought $6500 cash to our house to buy a car my dad had listed in the paper. Dad was REALLY uncomfortable having that wad of bills in the house overnight.
@whogots i once carried $25,000 in cash from my personal bank to a different bank so i could start a business account. In my head everyone on the road was out to murder me. I’ve never been so nervous in my life.
@djslack Why the cash? I talked my bank into issuing a cashier’s checks for the creation of my business account for free.
@Kabn You must have pretty good sales skills to talk your bank into giving you a free check in order to remove $25K from their bank
Kudos to you!
@Kabn Something to do with the timing… We were planning on making some big purchases asap. The new bank said they would have to wait on the cashier’s check to clear (isn’t that the whole point of a cashier’s check?) or some other dumbness that made us decide the best way to handle this and have the funds available was to bring them fat stacks of cash.
@chienfou Oh, mine wasn’t $25K, more like $6K. But I did get a different bank to do the same for closing out my personal accounts (~$15K). Cashier’s checks fees are basically all margin, and if they know you have at least some money to throw around, it’s easy to give the pitch of “Well, waiving this fee would really show you value my patronage and might make me more likely to come back if things change.” Any personal banker can waive them.
@djslack Yeah, that sounds about right. My ex was in item processing at a bank, and if something tripped one of the exception rules, they had to put a multi-day hold on it, even if it was a certified/cashier’s check. Even branch managers couldn’t bypass it. People got super pissed.
@Kabn Some people don’t want ANY paper trail on some transactions. May be why (?)
@lseeber if you take that much cash (>10k) into or out of a bank, you have triggered a paper trail. This is specifically called for by the usa patriot act although that may not be the only rule that requires it.
@djslack Yep… I’m well aware of that.
@Kabn
There are plenty of fake cashier’s check and certified check scams going round.
Vegas baby! 1985, not the first time I had seen one or even had one, but the first time I had a wallet full of them.
It was one of two, both negative:
My mother helped run the booster club at my high school, which entailed us running the concession stand at football games. One parent always paid for <$10 purchases with $100 bills, and it annoyed everyone who worked the till. Later, it came out the guy was in trouble for not paying his taxes.
My high school job was stocker/cashier at PetsMart. We saw an uptick in $100 bill usage on Fridays and Saturdays, assumedly because that’s when weekly payroll hit and people who didn’t have bank accounts took large bills. It sucked to have to call a lead to break one early in the day when I had a 6+ person line.
In fact, I’m not so sure I’ve ever personally had a $100 bill of my own money. All my vehicle/property purchases have been checks and of values that wouldn’t make sense to pay out in cash. I don’t gamble at casinos, and I rarely carry cash, period.
Random: a coworker of mine was a collector of some kind (coin, semi-precious stones?), and he never knew when he was going to find a deal. So he routinely carried between $3,000 and $4,000 on his person or in his vehicle.
Back in the day, when another guy and I did home repairs/remodeling locally we occasionally got paid by folks with C notes. Always a PITA to use due to many of the above mentioned problems… and bringing them to the bank in sufficient quantities would get you questioning looks…
I always tried to use them places that had reasonable resources so I wouldn’t “break the bank” at their register. Of course 20+ yrs ago it took more groceries than it does now and buying gas didn’t cut it either.
Fingers crossed for 2018.
We’re talking about monopoly money. Right? In which case I’ve seen a lot of them.
I think my very first was graduation day from grade school. I had an uncle who was pretty well-to-do; he put a $100 bill in my graduation card but with a note that it was to help pay for books in (private) high school. Earmarked! I got to hold it but my parents took it and used it for books… sigh.
Whelpers…
Not anything to do with this:
Extended Snopes report about cocaine on money:
https://www.snopes.com/business/money/cocaine.asp
(Tl;dr version:
yes, everywhere, due to money counting machines. Tiny tiny amounts tho. A few millionths of a gram in a single bill.
The new UK £5 note is slightly stiffened, due to techie currency paper upgrades.
And it’s slick paper. So people are using it to consume drugs. Only: the paper is stiff enough to cause many small cuts inside the nose. Which people often can’t feel, due to coke’s anesthetic properties.
So now they can destroy their noses even faster than the old way, I guess.
The note has Churchill’s pix on it.
(I thought all the UK currency had the Queen’s image? Guess not, anymore.)
Anyway, when cokeheads cut their noses that way, they call it " getting Winston’d".
Vice article on this:
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/d7a4pa/we-asked-a-currency-expert-about-the-most-coke-friendly-bank-notes
The article also contains thoughts from headshop personnel, currency experts, and drug dealers who were interviewed.
Re: tallow in currency paper:
More fun with the new UK currency:
The currency paper contains small amounts of tallow, likely from cattle or sheep.
Many people don’t like this. And I understand. I might not like it much were I there.
Ethical and animal-use related reasons aside, supposedly all the UK currency in circulation contains in sum and toto the tallow from about 1/2 cow.
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/dp3eyq/a-very-precise-calculation-of-exactly-how-many-cows-are-being-murdered-for-the-new-fivers
Good thing I quit being interested in all this so many decades ago.
What the hell. I was young and stupid. And the damned stuff was everywhere.
Now I’m old and stupid, but not that stupid that way.
Not to worry tho.
I got plenty supplies of other kinds of STUPID left. Not running out of STUPID anytime soon.