All about the money...

For a country so dedicated to the pursuit of dosh, it seems to me incomprehensible that Americans have such poor aesthetic taste when it comes to the design of their currency. The US "Greenback" seen in a thousand gangster movies, might well be iconic but it is also illogical and hard to understand - and not just for the jet-lagged foreign visitor.

Notes are all similarly sized and share ugly gray and olive green colours which makes them tricky to differentiate from one another. The unfamiliar foreigner often runs the risk of picking up the wrong note when searching through a fresh wad from the Bureau de Change and trying to pay for their service, a British friend once left $100 at a restaurant rather than the Ten Dollar tip he intended. Also, though I'm no expert on counterfeitting, but American notes don't seem to have much in the way of security features and could surely be copied more easily than Pounds or Euros. US Monopoply-board money also has an annoying tendency to stick together: I once gave away two twenty dollar notes for a hot dog in Little Italy, my protestations for the correct change were unproductive. It's not only the notes that don't make sense: the nickel coin (five cents) is actually - bizarrely - bigger than dime (ten cents).

Okay, after a while you do start adjusting to these things: you get to differentiate between the Founding Father designs of the notes and realise that the dime is differentiated from the nickel as it's a little bit shinier, but it does seem unecessary. For a country that built itself of on its rationality and logic it does seem, well, irrational and illogical. Maybe they could take a leaf out of the British book with our nice multi-sized and colourful currency.

The other interesting thing is the American reliance on the One Dollar Note. The BoE decided that it wasn't worth printing a Pound note back in 1988 but yet the US reliance on the single dollar note, currently worth about 60p, is retained. Why? Maybe it is because it is easier for bar staff who earn a dollar a drink served in their tip money (as is custom here)? Maybe the extra paper money gives a comforting illusion of wealth? Maybe no politician has the cojones to abolish a note with George Washington on it? I don't know.

The other thing worth mentioning here is the American Automatic Telling Machine (they don't talk about Cash Machines or The "Hole in the Wall". The experience of dispensing our cash costs Americans a lot more than us Brits. Almost all charge, unless you belong to a specific bank. The typical fee is about $1.50 to $3 in NYC whilst we only pay for the really rubbish ones in Cost Cutter when we are really desperate. On the flip side, there do seem to be more ATMs to find in NYC and the ones owned by the banks offer a few extra things, including info on your recent transactions. That said, I always shake the cover of any shifty-looking ATM I use, in case it has a card-cloning cover after my card got copied in London last Summer, and had £100 stolen by some guy in Kuala Lumpur.