The Fifty Dollar Bill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0ujxc2bMHE
It’s a sunny spring day in the South Cariboo. People are out and about … it’s peak Garage Sale season. As my friend Tim would call them - Garbage Sales!
A phenomenon of modern culture to be certain. A last ditch effort by individuals to recover some value and keep things out of the Share Shacks (the next step towards the Landfill) and the Landfill itself. This is my story of The Fifty Dollar Bill and a Garbage Sale Adventure.
Change for a $50 bill is required for any Garbage Sale adventure. In three gas station stops nobody would or could make change. So, I decided to purchase some breakfast from the local coffee shop The Chartreuse Moose. The cashier took my order and when it came time to pay, she wouldn’t take my $50 bill saying citing the fact that it was “too early in the morning”. This was confusing, as it was not that early, it was 8:30 am and I could see there was a pile of change & bills in the cash register. I ended up leaving without being able to pay for the $9.00 in locally made breakfast sandwiches as desired. Instead I was forced to go over to Tim Hortons Drive Thru (aka Timmy Ho’s) and got two breakfast sandwiches there. I picked up my Garbage Sale accomplice and we tasted our sandwiches - in comparison to K-Lyns breakfast sandwich at the Moose - we had to wonder “is this Timmy’s sandwich even food?!”
It is safe to say that cash is no longer King in Canada. In fact, some guy named Charles claimed he is King of Turtle Island most recently!
I had to do my research to learn that the refusal to accept a $50 bill to pay for a $9 exchange is not an illegal practice in Canada if it is made explicit that it is not accepted.
“Shopkeepers may reject large banknotes, which is covered by the legal concept known as invitation to treat. The right, in many jurisdictions, of a trader to refuse to do business with any person means that a would-be purchaser may not force a purchase merely by presenting legal tender, as legal tender needs to be accepted only for debts already incurred.” - Wikipedia
Technically, I had already made the order and incurred the debt - so the cashier was required to accept the legal tender. Otherwise she might have asked how I was paying ahead of time…
In reality none of that happened and I left the store and they lost a sale. Not a very pleasant experience … no wonder so many store front businesses in small towns are struggling when the orientation of customer service is it’s easier to refuse sales. It is noticeable that many front line workers have become ingrained in the mentality developed during the Covid-19 schematic.
Never-the-less, we were off on the adventure. Turns out, the large garage sale had multiple vendors and people who could break a $50 bill anyhow!
At the Garbage Sale, I had an epiphany. What if we could pull together to create a Re-Store & Repair Cafe (a huge collective and on-going Garbage Sale) in our Local? We have a number of Thrift Shops, one of which is serviced by the Cedar Crest Society for Community Living and provides jobs and revenue among the special needs members of our community. Cedar Crest has a two box drop off limit and only accepts re-saleable items. This likely leads to an abundance of materials going to the share shacks & dump. Could this be expanded upon? Currently there is a group offering a repair table at the Farmers Market once per month and we hope to help them grow. Oddly, the one lady trying to “run-it” decided to be anti-social and called me creepy in an email chain when I offered to help and participate … oh well that’s small town bullies for ya.
Functional Re-Store(s) & Repair Cafe’s for actual recycling and salvage of materials are made invisible to the point of absence by the various levels of Legal whateverings in our society. What we actually see is the Re-cycling Depot and what we know about the corporate recycling system is that these materials are shipped out of country for profit. Often to places where it can not logistically be recovered in a meaningful way anyhow.
Public service Re-stores and Repair Cafe’s are a most prudent necessity, even just to begin to comprehend and come to terms with the waste produced by the ignorance of corporate consumerism.
One small step towards holistic and functional ways of living. How else do we move en masse towards adoption of well developed sustainable models such as the Earthship model pioneered by Michael Reynolds or the Venus project modeled by Jacques Fresco.
Back to the Fifty Dollar Bill : we expect that our Canadian Legal Tender will be “updated” soon and Elizabeths’s face will be replaced by Charles’ face on the new coins and bills. That is unlikely to generate much excitement generally among the people in Canada (I mean look at the fella, not exactly something I want to put in my pocket). Perhaps the new coins will be the impetus to push for a cashless society?
The Crown’s Digital ID system is ready to launch - as predicted - it was completed by December 2022. I personally met up with a Federal Official of the Dominion of Canada in November who had been working on the Digital Currency project for years. As a bureaucrat working on tech development inside the Federal bureaucracy he was both anxious and frustrated that it was “taking so long and being resisted by people”. Unfortunately the Crown’s fiat currency is continuously devaluing, becoming ever more worth-less.
Lucky for us - and our readers - we get to witness (and should we choose to: use) the replacement system on the horizon. With Moneta - Coins, Stamps and Bonds - arriving just in time as a stable currency in our local campus and beyond. As of June 2023, the first person has received Moneta in exchange for community services!
What IS Moneta? Well, that’s a topic for an upcoming article and podcast! Remember to Get Tuned over on Cameo Radio.
Adios Amigo!
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