Eva Bradley: Paper money not what it used to be

Big notes are not often well recieved these days.

This week I found myself in possession of a couple of crisp, crackling hundy notes - $100 of pure, unwrinkled buying power. Or so I thought.

In today's electronic world, our wallets are heavy with plastic instead of paper and it is not often that bank notes of any description, let alone the highest denominations, feature in day-to-day, non-drug related transactions.

Although I knew this to be true, I hadn't realised quite how difficult this made using my $100 notes, nor how confronted retailers would be when presented with it.

My first encounter came after seeing my chiropractor, where I proffered my hundy to pay for a $48 treatment.

The look on the receptionist's face when I presented the bill would not have looked much different had I given her a wet turd instead. Neither, apparently, were practical options for paying my bill. There simply wasn't the change.

Thanks to the quick combined wits of the receptionist and others in close proximity, some smaller denominations were juggled and I walked away with a $50 note volunteered by the next patient and a $2 coin.

The brief experience had felt a little like an evening at the casino mixed together with a primary school maths class.

A little peckish after this brain bender, I decided to avoid any further complications and break my remaining $100 note at a large retailer that would presumably deal in hundies on a very regular basis.

Handing over the note at the McDonald's drive thru, I again got that wet turd look, followed swiftly by the confused look of someone who has been thrown totally outside their comfort zone.

The manager was promptly called over and I was given an eyeballing as though I had just arrived on the last plane from Syria.

Presumably passing some mysterious and internalised approval system, I was left waiting while the manager scuttled away to count out my change. One can only presume counting to 100 was not considered a necessary requirement in the training of drive-thru staff, or else the handling of a $100 note was a management-only transaction.

Now gratefully awash with smaller and more socially acceptable notes, I began to wonder if we had reached a stage where paper money really was becoming obsolete.

Because the irony is that although large-denomination notes are clearly no longer common currency, $100 today feels like $10 did a decade ago.

We barely have to look sideways at a product or service before becoming at least a hundred dollars poorer. Perhaps I'm showing my age but I recall a time when I got 50 cents pocket money and was able to go to the dairy on the corner and get a bag of sweets big enough to make the dental nurse cry when I spent it.

Today you just about need to take out a second mortgage to pay the pocket money and win Lotto to take the family to the movies. But because we so seldom see $100 in cold hard cash, being in possession of a bank note that size makes us feel disproportionately loaded. I'm sure if we got rid of our eftpos cards and went back to stuffing our wallets full of cash we would find ourselves spending an awful lot less than we currently do (and not just because so few people can get their head around giving out change for $100).