I look to Switzerland with envy, where as far as I can tell you can stroll into the supermarket and drop a 1000-franc note without issue.
I have heard this since I was a kid, in reality, it isn't true, at least not in London. I have never been refused when presenting a £50, not that I have carried them more than a dozen times. Most places that have issues taking them are small merchants who give away too many notes breaking them, so will often ask for a smaller note. When I was in New York once, I went into a CVS and bought $60 of sweets to bring home, the cashier shouted 'bill check' when i presented a $100 bill, so I guess I look more dodgey in the US.
It's just dumb. UK government should definitely drive a larger adoption of the £50 notes, it's so bizzaire to me that the British population treats their own banknotes like something from the moon.
How so? And if this is an actual, real problem...then stop printing them? What's the point of making currency that normal citizens have issues using?
I just don't undestand it on some fundamental level. Where I'm from(Poland)_200PLN(about £40) notes are very common in circulation, and if you were to pay for a 5PLN loaf of bread with a 200PLN banknote I can guarantee literally no one would bat an eyelid. It's a common and completely normal banknote to use.
Yet in UK, where people make more money on average and also buy more expensive things, the £50 is some alien piece of paper that most Brits have never even seen. The only other place which treats its own currency with such disdain is Germany where I saw signs on petrol stations sayng they don't accept 500 Euro notes. Well if you don't, then why even have them? What's the point? The government should be going after all retailers who don't accept any official currency, because that seems like the very basis of working currency system.
https://www.ft.com/content/afe8ed5a-cd10-11e5-986a-62c79fcbc...
I think you're conflating twoo things as well. Retailers don't like high denomination notes because they're more likely to be forgeries (getting change from a low value purchase with a high denomination note is a simple way to launder forged notes)
Governments don't like them because of tax evasion (though they'll call it "anti money laundering because not all upstanding citizens are entirely averse to a spot of cash-in-hand money laundering).
I presume there's just enough demand from business (where using high denomination notes for high value B2B transactions has very low transaction costs) that they still print them, but I would be surprised if they're still around in a decade.
However, if you're making a jewelry purchase with multiple 50 quid notes, denying them would seem unreasonable.
I have seen places checking $5 bills in some parts of town.
Legal tender is only a thing for the settlement of pre-existing debts.
Very difficult to get contactless working in the midst of the Cheviots.
- I don’t really think the problem is forgery. I think it’s that it is annoying for a lot of shops to make change for £50.
- I don’t think the government is particularly interested in making cash more convenient for people (card transactions are easier to track) and wealthy people mostly aren’t interested in carrying around high-value notes as credit cards exist.
edit: to add to that, it used to be that £1 coins were the most forged in sterling cash. I can't say if that's still the case, but at one point it felt like 1 in 3 pound coins were a fake.
Minor, and probably specific to busy bars, but it did come up: there's also the practical issue of where you put a £50 note as there's no space for it in a register. So you kinda shove them at the bottom of another stack, but there's the danger that when you're very busy and handing change back you'd grab it without looking. So always had to tell another staff member there was a £50 in the register, and ideally that register got emptied asap.
> During later years of the round pound's use, Royal Mint surveys estimated the proportion of counterfeit £1 coins in circulation. This was estimated at 3.04% in 2013, a rise from 2.74%.[9][10] The figure previously announced in 2012 was 2.86%, following the prolonged rise from 0.92% in 2002–2003 to 0.98% in 2004, 1.26% in 2005, 1.69% in 2006, 2.06% in 2007, 2.58% in 2008, 2.65% in 2009, 3.07% in 2010 and 3.09% in 2011.[40][41] Figures were generally reported in the following year; in 2008 (as reported in 2009), the highest levels of counterfeits were in Northern Ireland (3.6%) and the South East and London (2.97%), with the lowest being in Northwest England.[42][43][44] Coin testing companies estimated in 2009 that the actual figure was about twice the Mint's estimate, suggesting that the Mint was underplaying the figures so as not to undermine confidence in the coin.
IIRC that is/was only in number though, not total value.
The £50 notes were perceived as "most likely forged" because - in addition to being temptingly large denominations - they're so rare the average person has never used one and doesn't really know what they look like. There's a vicious circle of course: ATMs don't dispense them and banks are unlikely to unless requested because they're not widely accepted. The £20 note doesn't have that problem.
We have the a similar issue in Germany, but it's mostly with 200€ notes (and 100€ notes for a small shop, maybe). I've never had anyone even as much as look annoyed to being handed 50€.
That was what we were told back when I worked in a small shop in a theme park in the late 90s. That combined with the fact that because we rarely saw them people tended to be worse at picking out fakes than they were with smaller denomination notes.
We were to ask people to go to the cash office at the front of the site to have large notes swapped for smaller currency, £10 and lower. The reason we gave the customer (which as you mention had the benefit of also being true, even though I was very much given the impression it wasn't management's primary concern) was that it would take all the change from out tills. We would accept £20s, though the sign up front suggested they be changed first too.
> solution surely isn’t to get rid of the notes as that just shifts the forgery to the next note down
The recognisability helps with lower denomination notes though. And taking a forged £50 is more of a hit than taking a forged £10 amongst others.
> Surely instead the solution would be higher valued notes being created.
The solution we are heading towards, more rapidly now due to C19's effects, is cashless. I still have a few coins in my running pouch in case I need to use a non-free public convenience and a few of notes in my wallet just in case the cards fail, but I don't think I've actually used cash at all in the last 12 months and that may remain the case once This is all over (there is a local corner shop that won't take contactless or other card payments for less than £10 - I simply don't go to that shop any more as that is inconvenient for me for single small items so I do without for now or walk further, and for needs >£10 I'll walk further to a larger store with more options anyway).
There's also a high cash demand from tourists, and a high nighttime demand (when machines won't be refilled).
> smuggled out of China
That's unfair: completely honest tourists often have £50 notes, regardless of where they come from. The currency exchange office prefers high-ish denominations of most currencies. They take up less space, which matters when everything has to fit in a safe, and are generally in better condition.
Anyway, the relevance to our conversation: since value density is highest with £50 notes, that's what they tend to bring.
£20 in 1994 was £10 in 1981 - 13 years before.
£20 in 1981 was £10 in 1975
Before that 1969 and 1950
So that’s doubling in 19,6,6,13,26
So inflation is at long time record lows despite the last period including the 08 crash and covid
CPIH figure includes houses, under that £20 today was £10 in 1990, so even lower.
I take a unscientific approach in that I had a bar menu from 1971 (my birth year) showing the prices in old and new money. A pint of Skol was 5 new pennies in 1971, and today you can find an equivalent pint of lager at about 5 pounds.
So that's 100 fold increase in my lifetime.
A lot of that came out of the 70's and early 80s but current inflation does, anecdotally, seem higher than 1-2% a year.
Ale prices themselves have increased 73% since 2000, lager 85%, according to beerandpub.com
Annecdoatally in 2002 I was paying £1.60 in a student bar in the south west. Earlier this year I paid over £5.50 in a sam smiths in london, you might think it’s increased, but those were two very different pubs though. London prices are far higher than the majority of the country, and the range is even higher now. Perhaps CPI should be measured on a regional basis, as rents in london increased due to high demand and high paying jobs, prices of goods and services had to also.
Since 2008 according to the British beer and pub association, annual beer inflation has been 2.8%. The most expensive beer since 2008 has increased on average 5% a year.
Beer will be higher inflation than other measures like Big Macs as the tax has increased on it - both duty and vat. Pre tax beer prices were 1.43 in 2002, 1.91 in 2008 and 2.42 in 2019.
That’s an 08-19 increase of 2.2%
I’m sure (as far as bars go) contactless payment will be preferred more in future. COVID has sped up the process of that. It’s unlikely to see many £50 notes around. There were already a lot of “card only” bars in London and that was pre-COVID.
Also inflation is low and will be low for quite some time so that won’t be a factor.
In many countries, accepting cash is legally required. Unless a foreign national can pay with their credit card reliably, such a rule should be the required fallback payment method.
Some constituent countries of the UK have legal tender laws but a legal tender law only applies to debts and you have not incurred a debt when you offer to buy something.
In pubs that are card-only, pay-first, you might have an argument - but this may become a discrimination lawsuit the moment my card gets denied when the sticker says it should be accepted.