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Best Buy Has Man Arrested for Using $2 Bills
An anonymous reader writes "Mike Bolesta of Baltimore thought he would protest Best Buy's not-so-great customer service and pay his bill with 57 $2 bills. For his trouble he got to spend some time in the county lock-up." From the article: "..Bolesta was contacted by the store, and was threated with police action if he did not pay the [installation] fee he was told before did not exist. As a sign of protest, Bolesta decided to pay using only $2 bills, which he has an abundance of because he asks his bank for them specifically. Unfortunately for him, the cashier did not seem to understand that the $2 bill is indeed legal US tender, since the bill itself is not often used. After rudely refusing to take the money, the cashier accepted the bills, only to mark them as though they were conterfeit."
Truthfully, I would find it strange as well. I have not seen a $2 bill
- at -Taco-Bell.html
in a long long time. Same thing with all those $1 coins. However,
people tend to accept strange coin amounts a lot easier then paper
money amounts.
It happens more then you might think. For a funny story about trying
to use a $2 bill at Taco Bell, check this out:
http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/closet/silly/2
However, I see it on the web attributed to at least 3 different
authors, so I doubt it really happened.
--greg Vulcan quiescent... Q: What machine shutdown with this message?
Americans got too stupid to accept our own currency.
What's next?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes yes, that's great. But now for the question we're all wondering about: Did he go for the service plan?
.
_
::Firmly tougue in cheek::
::Removes tongue from cheek::
Maybe he installed the radio to listen to terrorist broadcasts.
Maybe he was laundering money for the terrorists.
Maybe he was just distracting the area law enforcement so that a greater scheme could be employed without hinderence.
You just never know, and everyone is a suspect.
Remember, If you spend your two dollar bills, Al-Queda wins.
Laughable, if it wasn't the mindset of the person who spoke it.
Strangely, as the man was being escorted out of the store, the clerk was heard to say, "Would you like a service contract with that..."
Some settling may occur during posting.
Good thing he didn't pay with Susan B. Anthony dollars.
The poor bastard may have been sent to Death Row!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Try using $2 bills at a strip club.
They don't call the cops, they just beat the crap out of you. Then they trash your car.
Not that I know from, er, personal experience.
fsh
I almost exclusively pay with $2 bills. I go to the back every few weeks and get about $400 worth, and just pay for most things with them, or a credit card if the value's quite high?
:)
Why? Mostly, for the expression I get from the counter staff:
"Two dollar bills? Cool! Oh... damn, where do I put them in the till?"
Sometimes they go into the clerk's pocket, after being replaced with more 'common' bills
1. Get treated badly by Bestbuy 2. Pay with $2 bills as protest 3. Get arrested, handcuffed to a pole 4. Sue police & bestbuy for millions 5. Profit!
It's bad enough he was arrested and imprisoned for using legal tender...but locked up in Cockeysville? That, my fellow posters, is torture.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
You know, that a Best Buy would have such an ignorant cashier (who now claims the bills were "smudged" and so "appeared to be counterfeit") does not surprise me in the least. It happens. Lots of people are stupid.
You should try paying in Susan B. Anthony dollars someplace. Even though coins are struck with "One dollar" right on the face, some people insist that they are quarters. Very annoying.
Let all the /.ers unite and protest. Lets not buy from Best Buy. Let the bastards starve. Then all the employees there, including the cashier will have to pose nude for 'PlayBoy Best Buy edition'. I really dig that blonde chick at the store... finally I can get a glimpse ;)
fuvoo: watch something
Jesus Christ whats wrong with you? don't you have any sense of patriotism? in this day and age we have to give up a few freedoms like the use of $2 bills if that means America land of the free(tm) stays safe from terror.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Like the guy in TFA, I ask for $2 bills all the time from the bank when I cash my paycheck. The bank is more than happy to give them to me, citing that they are a waste of space for other more common bills.
;)
The first round of fun comes when the teller gives me the money- usually tellers count money very fast, but when they get to the $2 bills, they slow down significanty (it's funny to me, at least). Next comes when you try to spend them at Wal-Mart. Here are my favorite examples:
1) The cashier asks me to pay with "regular" money, as she somehow didn't realize $2 bills are legal tender.
2) Another cashier asks me if they are fake. When I tell her no, they are in fact real, she questions me again, and turns on her blinky-light to signal the manager to come over. The manager tells her they can accept them, but asks me not to use them next time. The manager leaves, and the cashier is confused as to where they put the bills, as there is no slot for them. She puts them with the $20s, instead of under the drawer like she should (probably because they both had "2"s on them).
3) Yet another cashier questions their validity about a week later. He says there are no slots for 2s in the drawer, so he can't take them. I tell him there are no slots for 50s and 100s either, which for some reason upsets him. There goes the blinky light, and over comes the manager. She recognizes me from last week, and asks why I continue to "make trouble." I tell her that $2 bills are legal tender, blah blah blah, yet she insists that I only do it to cause problems (well, she kinda has a point there... but I like $2 bills because they are prime, like $5 dollar bills). Basically, she told me I was not welcome to shop there if I continued to try to use $2 bills there. I called the Wal-Mart customer service number, left a complaint, and suprisingly, was rewarded with a $20 gift card. I later received a letter stating that the manager has been contacted, and there is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't be allowed to spend $2 bills there. So now, every time I go, I make sure I use at least one of them.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Stupid cops? /is there any other kind...
You'd be surprised now some cashiers react to money like that. At the grocery store, I saw someone ahead of me try and pay part of their bill with a 50 cent piece, and the cashier handed it back saying "We don't take Canadian money". I gave the lady two quarters for it after trying to convince the cashier it was really a US coin.
I don't care what they do on their own time, but in public?
Think of the children....
fsh
As long as that cashier gets sufficiently cowed into submission and is willing to accept my $3 bills I say let bygones be bygones.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I work at Best Buy. We do not track people ...
But I notice you don't deny giving Canadian quarters in change...
Thanks. You just started a new meme. It may even overcome the "In Soviet Russia..." meme.
Au contraire, Uncle sam wants you to rat out anyone you think might be a 'terraist' regardless if you are a mindless slug on minimum wage, who if you had any fewer working brain cells, the majority leader of the senate would pass a bill to keep you alive against your will.
Sweet, I got in terrorism, Tom Delay, morons, low paid employees, and Terri Schiavo in one post. Tell me what I win Johnny!
"We don't even have 50 cent pieces up here..."
Isn't a 'Looney' worth US$.50 ?...
= ; ^ ) >
A sidebar on coins and currency. When I was a kid, you saw a lot of denominations you no longer see, even though they're still officially in circulation. I believe this is mainly due to the domination of retail by big chains, which don't like to deal with more denominations than will fit easily in a standard cash register. (If you run one cash register, dealing with fifty-cent pieces is a small nuisance. If you run millions of them, dealing with fifty-cent pieces subtracts big bucks from your bottom line.) So they put the "odd" denominations in the bank, and never give them out as change. That's why dollar coins will never catch on, unless and until Congress makes room for them by withdrawing dollar bills.
Kinda reminds me of a math teacher I had back in Junior High.
What's the least number of coins needed to make 45 cents? My answer was 2, a quarter and a 20-cent piece. She thought I was just being my normal sarcastic self, until I brought the coin in the next day.
That was pretty fun. We didn't make 'em for long (1875-1878), but we made 'em.
"try not to confuse the poor cashier" Especially when they give you too much change. ;-) I actually argued over that with one once and finally gave up.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Shouldn't a government employee know of such dominations?
I'm not sure his sex life has much to do with this.
Visit my serial fiction site at www.cornerscribe.com
Senators can read?
Actually we do...they just happen to be as uncommon up here as they are in the States
They seem to be slightly less rare than your $1.00 and $2.00 bills, but i've seen them.
I know I get hassled when I use $1.00/$2.00 Canadian bills in Canada.
Clerk "Where did you get these"
Me "Expo 87"
Clerk "But they say 86 on them"
Me "I imagine they were printed before Expo 87"
Clerk "Why do you have so many"
Me "Well, we can't spend your currency in america, I went with my class and I collected the left over currency from all my classmates, today I bring it back".
[a short time passes as they consult their book to see if it even looks like legal tender]
Clerk "Where do you expect me to put this?"
Me "Under the drawer where you keep your larger bills".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Not since you guys elected Bush twice. :p
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
That Mike Bolesta guy is probably one of them ignorant foreigners from New Mexico! Imagine someone trying to pass off a phony two dollar bill! Good thing Americans are all more skeptical since 9/11!!!!!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for the are subtle and quick to anger.
I use them all the time to make change for people who pay with $3 bills. Sheesh... some people!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's once
Loonie and Toonie.
They both _deffinately_ feel like they're worth something.
Sure, they feel like they are worth something, but the truth is that they are only worth one or two Canadian dollars.
(I keed, I keed!)
Count me as one of the people who thought there was nothing wrong with the "Ike" silver dollar.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
My next question is...did you then try to pay the cashier for your order with the 50c piece?
At most
If I was this guy I would send BEST Buy a fruit basket and a "thank you" card.
The winnings from the court case against them will provide him with an early retirement
A penny, nickel, dime, quarter, and half-dollar are all coins, and are all fractions of a dollar (.01, .05, .10, .25, and .50, respectively). The smalles denomination is a cent, which is, in fact, a coin (just like the next 5 steps). A dollar is just a hectocent, but "dollar" is so much easier to remember - and "dollar" doesn't sound like a sci-fi alien race that somehow feeds off of other organisms. "I'd hate to meet up with a pack of hectocents in a dark alley..."
I knew of a guy - a Libertarian - who'd do a similar thing.
He'd buy bunches of new two-dollar notes to get fresh ones with consecutive serial numbers. Then he'd take a piece of cardboard the same size as a bill, put a stack of bills on it, and stick one edge together with "padding compound" - the kind of glue used to stick together notepads (and stacks of food stamps).
He'd go out to a restaurant or what have you and, after the meal, would whip out the pad of fresh bills and ask "Do you take Federal Reserve Notes?".
Of course the typical response would be "Is that money?". To this he'd reply "No, but the government says you HAVE to take it."
(What he was alluding to was that, since the switch from Silver Certificates to Federal Reserve Notes, US currency is now unbacked. It is no longer "money" - actual precious metal or a certificate redemable for some - but now "fiat currency" - a promise by the government to use force to make people accept it for payment of debts as if it actually WAS money.)
(As I understand the federal law, if you have a debt and offer Fed notes for payment, if they refuse to take them as payment, your debt is paid AND you get to keep the notes - and you can enforce this in federal court, even if a state court then tries to make you pay again, pay with something else, or sieze your property to pay the debt. {There is a limit, however, on how big a debt you can pay with coins - so don't bring in a barrel of pennies.} But IANAL so don't take that as gospel.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You mean in a post-9/11 world, the post-9/11 meme will overtake "in Soviet Russia" meme?
... Dear lord, what have we done....
Quick, everyone overuse it now so it goes away like the Korea one. Start calling it "old meme." This is not a drill, people.
Why don't you buy 8 laptops a day, take them out of the box, drop them and return them?
Bill G.: Where is Longhorn?!
Developer: Sorry, but in this post 9/11 world, WinFS and Avalon just don't seem like that high a priority.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
They could create a coin that was worth as much as a dollar. It could be called a dollar coin. That would be neat.
I drank what? -- Socrates
...they look like five doller bills in a strip club ;)
I guess my point is: try not to confuse the poor cashier.
I think I'm going the exact opposite way. I don't buy much at Best Buy anyway but next time I do, I'm stopping by my bank and getting a bunch of $2 bills to do it with.
Bird is the Word.
< )
( \
X
8====D
http://smoke.rotten.com/bird/
Am I the only one who expected to see that followed by "walk into a bar"?
I knew a guy who had the habit of tossing dimes into the open cash draw at places like Mc Donald's. Apparently at the time McD's had a policy where they were much more worried if you had extra cash since it means you ripped off a customer where if you came up short you may be stealing from the company. The result is if your over by $.10 you end up counting and recounting and the manager gets to recount and someone has to fill out forms incase the irate costumer shows up looking for their $.10. He claimed that if you could get a dime in three draws it would waste an hour of a managers time.
I remember getting blitzed in Novia Scotia one night (too many Keith's and too many questions about the Ranger's sucktitude back when the NHL existed), and throwing back all of my coins as a tip to the bartender. Waking up alone the next morning, realizing I tipped the bartender about $80 bucks. Canadian bastards :)
The Big Yuan - tracking mainland China
I got you all beat here. I went on a tour of the US mint in sanfransico about 2 or 3 years ago. While there I decided to goto the bank after remembering there are $2 bills, and picked a few to use just for asshole value. While in the mint snack shope/cafe, I went to get my lunch and I hand the woman a few $2 bills who in return says to me. "We dont accept novilty money." With that quote I poited to the cealing behind me where large bills were haning in display and there was a $2 right there. How can you work at the MINT and not know?
give me a little more time - i'm pretty sure i can pin this on microsoft's stock-holdings in best buy...
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Wait a second, we're missing an important point here:
You go to a bar where you can buy a beer for a buck? Where is this little slice of heaven?
No, because strippers don't like coins.
Nice Marmot
I once got a $50 bill back in change when I should have gotten a $20. Not wanting to screw over some poor cashier I tried to Do The Right Thing (tm) and return the money.
"You've made a small mistake," I said - I swear, that's verbatim what I said, and the verbatim reply I got was
"NO. I don't make mistakes."
Being, in some situations, a slow learner, I repeated my assertion; "No, really, there's been a little mistake made." (Note the regression into passive speech - I was really, really trying to avoid assigning blame here.)
Nope. About six degrees Kelvin comes the reply, "I told you, I don't make mistakes."
"Fine," I replied, walking away, "at the end of the day, when you're adding up, remember that the mistake you didn't make was a $30 mistake."
I've never seen "definitely" misspelled with TWO "f"s before. That's a new one. It does give it that medieval Olde Englishe feel to it, though.
Copyright 1993 Captain Sarcastic (kkoller@nox.cs.du.edu)
On my way home from the second job I've taken for the extra holiday cash I need, I stopped at Taco Bell for a quick bite to eat. In my billfold is a $50 bill and a $2 bill. That is all of the cash I have on my person. I figure that with a $2 bill, I can get something to eat and not have to worry about people getting pissed at me.
At this point I open my billfold and hand him the $2 bill. He looks at it kind of funny and says,
He goes to talk to his manager, who is still within earshot. The following conversation occurs between the two of them.
He comes back to me and says,
He goes back to his manager who is watching me like I'm going to shoplift, and
The manager approaches me and says,
At this point he backs away from me and calls mall security on the phone around the corner. I have two people staring at me from the dining area, and I begin laughing out loud, just for effect.
A few minutes later, this 45-year-oldish guy comes in and says at the other end of counter, in a whisper:
Security guard walks over to me and says
I was standing outside Buckingham Palace waiting to see the Changing of the Guard, when a mounted cop rode over and herded us away from the gate to make way for a royal coach carrying a man in a Nehru hat. A lady next to me, obviously a fellow Yank, asked him "Who's the guy in the funny hat?" This dialogue ensued:
"That's the Ambassador from Mali, ma'am."
"What country is that?"
"Well, it's...Mali, ma'am."
"Well, where the hell is that?"
Whereupon the cop remembered urgent business elsewhere. I leaned over and said "It's on the Canadian border between Vermont and Manitoba. We depend on them for ball bearings."
She went away obviously satisfied.
rj
What...you mean China??
It could be called a dollar coin. That would be neat.
ObBushBash: Or they could put Dubya on it and call it a "loonie".
Fortunately for my friend, a vacationing Washington State Trooper was in the bar and convinced the bartender to pay for the replacement card -and- cover my friend's party's tab for the evening.
Wow, and whoever said there's never a cop around when you need one?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And the other half of us thought, "That's it, I'm never going to Best Buy again!"
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Homer and Comic Book Guy walk into Moe's
Homer: "When you've got a bum ticker like we do, you need all the friends you can get. And Moe's is the friendliest place in the Rum District."
Homer opens the door. Moe is pointing a shotgun across the bar at the guy with the hunting cap.
Moe: "Get out and take your Sacajawea dollars witch ya. I'll give you till three" (he cocks the shotgun as the guy starts to run). "One." (he pulls the trigger).
Eep! A slashdotter from my town! Get the pitchforks!
But seriously, why are you going to GRCC instead of GVSU? The only valid excuse would be culinary arts...
(yes I can take the karma hit)
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I just checked the map to see if those two provinces were actually side-by-side.
Jesus, I should be posting as AC.
Please don't mod me up!
And no smartass comments about how my sig is ironic.
Synergy is your friend
The bartender says: "Sorry, one dollar minimum charge."
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
In Korea, only old people start calling it an "old meme!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Only our chicks are much hotter.
"I really dig that blonde chick at the store"
God forbid you ask her out...
Reminds me of an old joke in the Netherlands, before the introduction of the Euro.
Two underworld figures meet on the street. One of them looks exceptionally wealthy, good clothes, nice watch, the show. The other asks: "How do you do that ?"
The first one tells him: I print money.
But that's illegal !
Well, I print 18 guilder notes.
What can you do with 18 guilder notes ?
Well, change them for something else - try it, you'll agree.
Second person goes off with some 18 guilder notes and enters the first store he comes across.
"I want to change some money" - and shows the 18 guilder note.
Cashier: That's OK - do you want 2 of 9 or 3 of 6 ?
I find it apprpriate to quote the Woz, from http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html
About 3 years ago I took my daughter, Sara, to Las Vegas for a gymnastics regional that she was in. During the lengthy warmups my wife and I walked down to the Hard Rock Casino and played slot machines. While generously feeding these machines I tipped the waitress a couple of $2 bills. Waitresses in casinos and other places often exclaim at how much they like getting these and how their kids love them. I have tons of $2 bill stories that will make a whole chapter in my book someday. My $2 bills are real and legit but unusual.
A short while later a casino security manager sat down next to me. He was very quiet and showed no emotion about anything. He was 30-ish and acted like a dedicated security man who knew everything about every type of cash situation ever. This man asked me where I'd gotten the bills and I started a little BS about buying them from a guy that hawked basketball tickets. I sometimes say this to peak the interest in people that wonder if these bills are real or not. I said that I thought the bills were good and acted like I didn't know what was going on, just enough to seem evasive. This man told me that they had tested the bills with their testing pen and that the bills were good.
Then he calmly said that they don't make them like this. I sat for a long time silent and he repeated his statement. I said "you mean, on sheets?" These two $2 bills were attached to each other and perforated. You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.
I take the sheets of 4 bills and have a printer, located through friends, gum them into pads, like stationery pads. The printer then perforates them between the bills, so that I can tear a bill or two away. The bills that I'd tipped the waitress came from such a pad.
Well, the casino security guy kept rubbing the perforation between the two bills but he still showed no emotion at all. He was strictly professional. When he said that they don't make bills like this I asked "They don't?" as though I thought it was quite normal to have sheets. My answer was also so emotionless as to confuse him about me, and to make me seem even more evasive. This, again, I do for a comedic effect. The gentleman then said "they don't make them with perforations." I again asked "they don't"", acting a little like maybe I got ripped off by the person that sold them to me. The security guy kept rubbing the perforation slowly.
Every currency bill has to have a different serial number. We all know that. But for the bills on a sheet, the serial number ends with the last digits the same, and the starting digits the same. It's harder to detect that an inner digit is changing when you look at the serial numbers on a sheet of bills.
So I next said to the casino security guy "you'd think that the serial numbers would be sequential." I normally say "the serial numbers are all the same" but I knew that he'd catch this falsehood more quickly than most people that I use it on. I also sensed a serious tone, based on his attitude, and didn't want to lie outright. Well, this emotionless guy looked slowly down at the two bills and his jaw jerked open. Even his head stayed still and no other signs of emotion showed, but his jaw jerked. I'm sure that he thought for an instant that he had captured Al Capone, counterfeiting $2 bills.
He remained motionless and expressionless for a few seconds and obviously must have discovered that the serial numbers changed in the middle. He calmly raised his head and acted as though nothing had happened, a
After having used Dutch "guilders" for a life-time and euro's for some time now, you can pretty well conclude that pounds (and the former Irish pounds) are _way_ too big. I think that the average Dubliner has lost about 1kg per person after they went with the euro's. Probably more due to inflation.
a valley in medieval Germany where cold was mined
Sounds more like medieval Iceland...
Yeah, I stopped doing bank deposits when I found out I wouldn't get exactly the same bills back.
Probably not. Check his account number. It is ten times less than yours!
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
compared with the people who deliberately smear stuff all over the mirrors and other fixtures in the bathroom (a semi-regular occurance when I worked at T. Bell)
If it was Taco Bell, perhaps they weren't smearing 'stuff' at all. Perhaps the stuff was actually exploding all over the bathroom!
The Civil War here was also known as the war of states' rights. It's also when the slogan "These United States" actually shifted to "The United States".
This post was brought to you by Ken Burns - and viewers like you.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!