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£50 Billion cash missing, check down the sofa!

I recall a local publican being a bit of an arse and refusing to accept a Scottish Fiver from some chap. I looked through my pocket change and carefully selected out three Welsh and two Scottish Pound coins with which I paid for a couple of drinks. After he'd put them in the till I pointed out his 'error'. He just muttered something under his breath..
 
I have not used cash since lockdown, I have been given cash for jam and gin sales and had to put it in the bank as it isn’t easy to pay for anything with cash and my wallet was getting full.

Pete
 
Ah yes. Your slave who does 10 windows for £5 and you flog him if they are not perfect.
Blimey, 10 windows for a fiver? Ah yes, you must live up north....we can't get the Eastern Europeans for love nor money
 
They’re traceable. As they each bank note has a unique number. The technology to track them isn’t that expensive nowadays either. But as that technology improved unfortunately so the cost of implementing it did as cash transactions reduced. There are some countries where this would have been relatively easy to sort.

Yes each note has a number, the technology to record that number is available, but would require a rework of every point of sale terminal, as well as a change to how transactions work (eg recording who made the transaction, or matching a transaction to a cctv time stamp). That sort of approach has been offered to and considered by retailers since the early 2000s, but has been deemed impractical and unwanted, again because of the privacy accorded a cash transaction.
The serial numbers, if anything, are a throwback to tracking production and issue of the notes, and inventory management by Central Banks.
 
I want a handheld scanner to use at the till to make a point of checking the notes that they give me back
Check the watermark and security thread when they give you the note back as change. I do it from time to time when/if they’re obnoxious about checking the notes I’ve used to pay for something. In my experience it really annoys the heck out of some people.
 
Yes each note has a number, the technology to record that number is available, but would require a rework of every point of sale terminal, as well as a change to how transactions work (eg recording who made the transaction, or matching a transaction to a cctv time stamp). That sort of approach has been offered to and considered by retailers since the early 2000s, but has been deemed impractical and unwanted, again because of the privacy accorded a cash transaction.
The serial numbers, if anything, are a throwback to tracking production and issue of the notes, and inventory management by Central Banks.
Doesn’t have to be tracked at a retailer necessarily. Doing it at each point it gets processed by a commercial bank (as it’s loaded into an ATM, and then paid back in by a retailer, for example) would provide v useful info to the Central Bank in terms of where all the damn money is.
Federal Reserve in the US are working on this now.
 
The commercial banks, or the cash in transit companies doing the work for them, have for years had the software systems to tell them how much money is in what ATM or point in the bank branch network at any point in time, but that’s about as far as it’s tracked. Large retailers have similar software to plan till and float preparation. That data is used to correlate with the number of notes issued, but it misses out a very large proportion of total cash out there not in the network.
In the case of the US the situation is worse as somewhere between 50% and 60% of banknotes are outside of the country, so domestically tracked data runs the risk of being inconsequential, in the large scheme of things.
 
Yeah fair points. Individual banknote tracking is a thing though...I worked in the industry for 35 years (up until 2018) and it sounds like you have some experience too!
 


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