My local city centre Ll*yds TSB has a lobby with 5 machines in it - 2 of these give fivers - usually 2 or 4, depending on the size of the withdrawal, although on one occasion, it paid me £200 in new fivers!!!
You get pretty much treated as a criminal by the shops if you try to use one to pay (UV light, watermark check ... you get it all whilst the checkout clerk tries their hardest to catch you out with a duff note)....... that's if they'll accept them at all (yes, legal tender I know... but many shops wouldn't budge on their no 50s policy unless you served them a legal letter).
I withdrew £100 from the Britannia Building Society in North End Croydon yesterday and got three £20, three £10 and two £5 notes. Think Barclays does give you £5 notes - again I'm sure the one in North End does. Also one of the cash machines by East Croydon station issues £5 notes only. Maybe that merely serves to confirm something about Croydon though!
Might be because so many people asked for them to use for the ticket machines on Croydon Tramlink - just a thought!
Legal tender has a very specific meaning and does not oblige shops to accept £50 notes (or any other notes for that matter) if they choose not to. Mind you I always took them when I had a shop - certainly wasn't going to turn business down.
I stuck £49.70 worth of unleaded in the car tonight and paid with a £50. "Oh thats the new £50 note with the Cornish engineers" said the lady as she rubbed her pen thingy over it to check it was kosher. "That's right", I replied, reckoning that a service station queue wasn't the place to start a history lesson on Boulton and Watt and I left clutching my 30p change
Sounds like $100 notes here. Present one and you automatically get treated like a drug dealer.
Quote:
Legal tender has a very specific meaning and does not oblige shops to accept £50 notes (or any other notes for that matter) if they choose not to.
Really? I'll have to check the story here, because I thought they had to take notes or coins unless there wasn't enough change (which is the standard bus driver excuse. '3.50 love, ooh no, I can't change a fiver') . Have you got any more info? I'm interested.
I assume ATMs can be calibrated for any type of money the owner wishes to dispense, after all they're sold to banks all over the world. I've heard the the same reason as notmyC150v2 was given, and I'm amazed you can get fivers at any machines, let alone 12 percent of them. When ATMs first appeared ours dispensed $10 notes, but over the years the $10 machines gradually faded away.
Slight thread drift, sorry, and may have been discussed before, but isn't it time we got rid of coins under 5p. I am sure a farthing had more buying power at the time it was retired than 4p does now, so would anyone really notice if 5p was the smallest division available??
Keep your smaller coins in circulation. In NZ, we did away with the 1 & 2c coins. Guess what? The 5c was withdrawn shortly thereafter because "it was costing more to mint than the face value of the coin". So now we have rounding (up or down) to the nearest 10c. I guess it evens out, sort of, over several purchases. The effect has been, though, to devalue the currency, at least in perception.
I can remember the halfpenny, penny, threepence, sixpence... through to the half crown we had in pre-decimal days. Plus the 10/- and £1, £2 & £5 notes. These days, the lowest denomination note is $5, the $1 & $2 ones having long since been replaced with coins.
Many of our ATMs only dispense $20s, some will cough up $50s. Strangely, one supermarket chain's self checkouts only dispense $5 notes (plus coin) as change.
BTW, check your bank's fees for ATM transactions. I have discovered that mine charges 50c per ATM withdrawal. Cunningly, it shows up on my bank statement as "Bank fees".
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Ahh - one of these in yer trousers and you could get royally pissed, have fish and chips, yer bus fare home and still have a bob left for the lekky meter!
I lived in NZ when they got rid of the 1c and 2c coins.
Was a real bugger - until then the 1c used to be very good for tightening or loosening most screws. When they disappeared, i had to go and buy a set of small scredrivers.
*** NERD ALERT *** NERD ALERT *** NERD ALERT*** With regard to the ATMs, the cash is contained in cartridges. These cartridges are identified to the ATM software as containing denominations. The ATM is only designed to physically dispense pieces of paper -the software is responsible for the mathematics of breaking the user request for $xxx down to how many pieces of paper to dispense from each cartridge.
In my younger days when i worked on the development and implementation of ATM systems we used cut up paper as 'cash'.
Also i remember a service failure where the bank accidentally installed $10 in the $20 cartridge and $20 in the $10 cartridge. So when dispensing $100 and the customer selected 5 x$20 they in fact only got $50. However if the same user asked for $10 denominations they ended up with $200 cash.
The ten shilling note reminds me of the story doing the rounds a few years ago of the two solicitors returning to their respective offices after lunch. Just outside A's office B bends down, picks a note of the kerb and says to A is that one of the old ten shilling notes handing it to A for a look. A takes it, has a look and says I think it is, do you want to come inside and I'll get your change.
Here in this part of Spain the ATM's also print all sorts of things: concert tickets for example. Which doesn't really help when you're standing behind someone wanting to go and see Status Quo* and all you want is cash.
I withdrew £700 from my account recently for various things I needed, mainly being travel money at Thomas Cook. Had to pay cash as there was more charges for paying by card. I asked my bank for it in £50s as didn't want a huge wad of notes. The refused saying they rarely carry them, and duly gave me £700 in £10s and £20s. Makes you wonder why the Bank of England bothers to have £50 notes if you can't easily get them.
) . Have you got any more info? I'm interested. 
