The Vending Public Still Unawares

Funny thing I regularly go to banks asking for coins and bills and you would be surprised how many young tellers have no idea what 50c and dollar coins are, I have to carry some with me to show them what I'm talking about, you would think the people who handle our money would know what money is

Gidgit, your payment with a nickel dollar is legal, but 1, 2, and 1000 dollar bills are no longer legal tender in Canada, so they would be right to refuse a one dollar bill as payment. You can however exchange it at a bank/credit union for a loonie

It is only going to get worse.

Last week I took to the bank a one 100 dollar bill and a 50.00 dollar bill to the TD bank. The tellers had to be in their early twenties. Had to call a manager over because they had no clue that these bills are legal tender. The manager came over to look at them. After answering many questions on why I had them and looking on the computer to see if they were real. After 20 mins the bank took the notes.
The tellers were amazed that those bills were real and thanked me for bringing them in.

PS Tim's has refused my 2 dollar bills as they have no idea if the bill's are fake or real.

Wow.


Oops.

I could'nt be bothered wasting my time trying to convince stores to accept old coins and bills. Just spend them at a coin store or coin show, or take them to a bank.

Here's the problem with this: how far back would you need people to go? Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, you would need to educate bank tellers on the existence and nature of every single piece of still-valid-but-no-longer-normal piece of currency, either coin or banknote - which would include quite a lot of things you might consider to be unnecessary and redundant, such as the coinage of Newfoundland and the other pre-Confederation provinces, the banknotes of the pre-Bank of Canada note-issuing banks that are still valid, and the other various now-obsolete forms of regal Canadian coinage such as large cents, silver 5 cents, and so forth.

You may well say, "so what, great, let them teach that stuff to their staff", but there's two issues to raise here.

First, how many young people are actually going to pay attention through this no doubt lengthy and to-them-boring and irrelevant "History of Canadian Money" class? Especially if those people are rarely-to-never going to see any practical application for 99% of this course material? They might remember some of the more interesting-to-them bits (like maybe silver 5 cents or large cents) but might not remember the thing which you happen to bring in.

Second... there is the matter of this being undesirable education from the bank's point of view. It is well known and documented that "learning the history of money" can awaken, in a small percentage of students, a desire to actually study and/or collect such obsolete money. In short, they might become numismatists. And the very last thing that banks want is a "collector" working for them, to the extent that most banks probably won't hire you if you admit you're a coin or banknote collector. A collector working for a bank causes all sorts of issues, as they have an annoying habit of treating different pieces of money differently, when the entire purpose of a bank is to treat all current pieces of money as fungible. They do things like sorting through their cash registers when no customers are in the branch, looking for odd coins for their collection or flicking through stacks of notes looking for RADAR numbers. This is seen, rightly, as "wasting company time" as idle tellers are normally tasked with other duties more profitable for the bank than for the tellers.

What, then is the answer? I would postulate that the answer would be to teach bank tellers that yes, various forms of obsolete or uncommon money exist, and the bank ought to put in a policy of how tellers handle such obsolete money. In a sense they already do this with the ARP, so it's really just a broadening of this. I would propose a policy of saying to the customer depositing oddities like 50 cent pieces "Of course sir, we will accept them provisionally, pending their validation". Then the funds would not be available to your account until after the coins/notes had been validated. This "validation" might be a simple as looking it up on Wikipedia (or a bank's internal reference database) or it might mean needing to send it off to the Mint or Bank of Canada and await a response. Items deposited with the claim they are "obsolete money" but is determined to not actually be valid or legal tender (such as tourist dollars, replica obsolete banknotes, or outright counterfeits) are withdrawn and destroyed, and the funds cancelled.

They might need to add some kind of extra burden, such as forms for the depositor to fill in or an "obsolete money processing fee", to attempt to discourage frivolous claims such as depositing wads of Monopoly money. This might also have the effect of encouraging people with quantities of these obsolete monies to take them to coin dealers instead of banks.