Non Legal Tender Status Of Coins

Legal tender is an interesting concept that has changed in it's interpretation over the years. Today legal tender means a legally recognized offer of payment, in the nineteenth century it was an obligatory form of payment. It had to be accepted. But many of the coins back then had only limited legal tender standing. Gold and standard silver dollars had unlimited legal tender status and had to be accepted for any amount. That was true of the other silver coins (except the Three Cent piece) before 1853. After 1853 the smaller silver coins were only legal tender up to $5. Amounts offered above that amount could legally be refused. The base metal coins also had only limited legal tender status, the cent was not legal tender at all until 1864, the Half Cent not until the 20th century.

This DID cause problems after the FE cents were introduced in 1857. The marketplace became saturated with the new coin. Since most purchases were for small amounts merchants had little choice but to accept them. But the banks can and did refuse the coins if their supplies were adequate. So the merchants accepted them, but may or may not be able to deposit them. And they really couldn't use them to purchase stock from their suppliers either. Frequently they only way to get rid of them was to sell them to jobbers at a discount. The limited tender silver was not as much of a problem because $5 was a significant amount of money and it wasn't as difficult to pass then to the bank in multiple deposits or by exchanging the silver in small amounts for gold and then depositing the gold.

To get a good idea of what coinage and its use were like in the 19th century I recommend reading Neil Carothers book Fractional Money. Copies can be found for about $15 to $20

That's interesting BStrauss3, while browsing coin videos on Youtube sometime ago I ran across one that was titled something like "Paying $80 bill with pennies". Some kid owed a tow company $80 to get his car out so he went and got $80 in pennies, when the company refused to accept them as payment the kid called the police. The police told the company that the pennies are legal and they had to take them so the company took them so long as the kid stood there and counted them out.

Seems to always be a sort of hot topic whether businesses have to accept pennies as payment or not. Even police don't usually know whether they really have to.

IMHO, it's simply an immature act to pay in pennies when you could go cash them in at a bank, I'd never do it just on the basis that I'd never want it done to me haha...

Now I am curious. Since the Mint is the only leagal producer of coins in the US, what are the beer tokens the bar gives considered? They look like poker chips make of hard plastic and have the bars name on them and give no change in return, but they are gotten by exchanging the price of a beer.

Are they considered gift certificates? Arcades for years have made tokens to get your full dollar up front and then you have to pay with the token in the machine. So If a business used ONLY tokens for payments and put token amounts as the prices, would that work and be legal under that law? They only sell tokens for cash, and then all items can be got from trading in token, like PuttPutt does with its prize tickets.

Isn't that in effect creating your own currency?

Are you familiar with script?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

Ok, so maybe I have asked this before but that TV show with the guy, I think he was married to Teri Hatcher (Lois Lane) at one time, had "BerkShares" mentioned on it. The law says you can't mint money, only the US Mint can, so these BerkShares were like bills. the "bar token" is like a poker chip, or a coin. Doesn't that mean even internally these are coins? Could a business issue change only in its own "exchange tokens"? or is the smallest limit $1 since anything less at this time would be considered a "coin"?

If the business had no change to give and everything was rounded (including tax) to a dollar?

Someone goes into a store, buys $200 worth of store tokens, they function like gift certificates for example, right? So what is the smallest size gift certificate, in token form? Considering 25-cent style arcade tokens still exist and all...

They will go after you for counterfeit poker chips - http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/20...ino_pip.html

Lots of things can be scary. There are laws on the books which they can use to bring charges against pretty much anyone. A couple of my favorites that I have seen used in the charges against some admittedly bad people are possession of bomb making materials, or weapons of mass destruction.

What are bomb making materials? Chemicals or items that can be used in the construction of a bomb. These can include but are not restricted to things like nitric or sulfuric acid, bleach, batteries, wire, timing devices such as watches or cell phones etc.

I though WMD's was an odd charge because typically when the think of WMD's we think of chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons. So I checked to see what the legal definition of a WMD is. it is any weapon that can kill or injure more than one person at the same time, or an explosive item containing more then 4 oz of explosives. Ever see those shyrocket moror shells you can buy at any fireworks stand or shop around the country? The larger ones of those contain 500 grams of explosives. Four times the amount required to legally be a WMD. So buy some fireworks to celebrate the fourth of July and you could be charged with being in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

I'm not saying thy would do it, but if they wanted to get you on SOMETHING those two charges could be used against just about anyone. (and if they do have someone on some other charge they are nasty charges that could be added to make the bad guys life more difficult.)

I'd say legal yes, feasible probably not except for very limited circumstances.