US bank rejects silver quarter as ‘bad money’…

Just a quick note today… a funny story to end the week.

Like you probably do, my friend Larry keeps a large change bucket. Every night, he drops in a few coins that he might have picked up throughout the day… and gradually, it accumulates.

Every now and again, Larry takes his change bucket to the bank to use its automated coin machine. You put in the coins, and the machine spits out bills (or deposit slips).

Now, Larry is a worldly guy, and he travels frequently. So occasionally a coin from Canada or Europe will have made its way in to the coin bucket. But these machines have a very sensitive tolerance, and any ‘bad’ coin is rejected.

Larry emailed me the other day telling me about his most recent bout with the change machine:

“As expected, it kicked out a Canadian penny, a coin from the Netherlands, even one of those souvenir fake pennies that people pay to get inscriptions on. Then, a US quarter as well. And I laughed, because it was from the early 1960s back when quarters were made from real silver.”

The machine rejected Larry’s silver quarter as “no good”… a very perverse example of how far our society has devolved from the concept of real money.

Share this article

About the author

Stay in the loop

Get our new Articles delivered Straight to your inbox, right as we publish them...

0 Shares
Share via
Copy link