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Published on 11/02/1998 All articles from this issue

Not everybody's happy with the new $20 bill

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By Clyde Noel

A Side of Clyde

When I was at Wells Fargo Bank Monday, the teller gave me one of the new $20 bills. Andrew Jackson looks different. His eyes are fixed, his lips pursed and his brows are furrowed. There's another picture of him on the right side of the bill you can see when you hold the bill to the light. I like that picture better.

Actually I like the old $20 better with the fancy scroll work and easy-to-read domination. The picture of our seventh president is softer and doesn't look like he just came out of the barbershop - for a shave.

Millions of the new bills, redesigned to foil counterfeiters, were shipped out to banks last month. These new $20s are crisp and clean, but destined for lives of soil and stain by millions of fingers. The U.S. Mint said the life of a $20 bill is six months. What bothers me is, how come none ever die in my hands?

I first learned about the new $20s several months ago from a radio commercial sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank. The announcer said, "Even though we have new bills, your old ones are still good." I thought that was ridiculous. Were they afraid people would tear up the old $20 and think: "Darn, now I have to throw out all my old $20s."

One group of citizens who doesn't like the new $20 is seniors. They can't tell the difference between new $20s, $50s and $100s.

The all-new $20 bill is creating millions of dollars' worth of headaches in one fast-growing corner of the American economy - the high-tech vending machines.

These machines take cash in exchange for items like prepaid telephone cards, gasoline, mass-transit fares and even the U. S. Postal Service. The machines can't read it, either, and reject the new bill.

The U.S. Postal Service said about 12,000 of its 30,000 postage-dispensing machines accept the old $20 bill, but almost none accept the new ones. They told me you have to wrinkle it or toughen it up in order to recreate the natural wear and tear of a bill. I did, tried the machine again, and it worked.

The difficulty is a harbinger of problems to come. In the year 2000 the Treasury Department plans to introduce new versions of the $10 and $5 bills, and a redesigned $1 bill is expected to follow.

The $20 bill is important, but as a $1 bill, you wouldn't be on good speaking terms with your butcher. You're too small to buy a pint of ice cream, and not big enough to buy candy at the movies. You can't buy a gallon of gas and you're hardly big enough for a tip anymore. But on Sunday, you can still put it in the collection box and no one complains.

There are good things about the new Andrew Jackson bill. There's a lot of white space and the back of the bill is faded so you can use it to write telephone numbers or Web page numbers you see when away from the computer.

There are roughly 4.2 billion $20 bills in circulation and the bureau is replacing them at the rate of about 1 percent a week. Many people have yet to see one.

There's a group of words on the old $20 bill and the new $20. It's "In God We Trust." I would like to see on the new $20, "We also trust in the Federal Reserve."

Clyde Noel is a longtime contributor to the Town Crier.