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by tialaramex
3 days ago
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The reason not to do this with banknotes is that they wouldn't be accepted. "No weird money". I happen to live in a city on England's south coast. So Scotland is quite far away and understandably Scottish banknotes, though legally equivalent to the notes you'd get here in most senses, are rarely seen. I know what they're supposed to look like and that they're 1:1 equivalent, but of course the guy who runs the Chinese takeaway near me wouldn't have seen one before. So what happens when a Glaswegian down for the weekend wants to order some food and tries to pay with the Scottish £10 in his wallet? The owner doesn't accept it. "No, no, no!". The Glaswegian insists it's legal tender [which is irrelevant, but if you don't know why it's irrelevant feel free to go look it up, it's not helpful for me to tell him this even if he believes me and I see no reason I need to explain to you either] and of course all the time they're arguing about money I am not getting my food. So I took the man's Scottish £10 and handed the restaurant owner an English £10 because I don't care and now I can order food. Weird money is bad. If you live in a border town you'd see notes from both sides. If you work in a tourist-facing industry you might recognise most of the variants because tourists tend to have their country's notes. But if you're some small town shopkeeper in Poland why would you know that this is real €200 note from Luxemboug? It's probably a fake, isn't it? So you make friction for these notes higher (some shopkeepers won't accept them) and even if legally they're fine you can't fix that friction in practice so people hate this outcome. |
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https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-is-legal-ten...