My mom said she went to pay for her Starbucks with a 50 beings it’s what she had on her and the lady working said “Starbucks and Home Depot don’t accept 100s and 50s for “safety reasons”. I don’t understand what the safety issue is.
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Those bills are much more likely to be counterfeit.
There are also the non safety reasons that accepting that kind of bill means that you have to keep more bills and coins on hand to make change and it will take longer for cashiers to make change, making customers wait longer.
I don’t know about Home Depot but for Starbucks there are two main reasons:
$50s are more likely to be counterfeit. So order a tall coffee and pay with a $50 means you’re getting $45+ in good change.
Depending on the size of the Starbucks they only have $150-$350 in their drawer, $50+ of which is in coins so $50 or $100 could empty a large amount of paper money which means the safe will need to be opened to get more money, so it’s a time people might try to rob the store
Counterfeiting operations throughout the 90s and 00’s focused on making fake $50 and $100 bills. There were/are so many of them in circulation that businesses started outright refusing to except large denomination bills for their own safety.
Counterfeiters would pay for small items in large bills, and in exchange would get a bunch of *clean* cash and change.
This is in part what pushed a lot of businesses to start accepting Debit Cards and Credit Cards as their primary sources of payment.
Since then large denomination bills have become common place only when doing deals were large amounts of cash are required, like drug deals.
This is also partly why businesses won’t accept $50s or $100s because a lot of that money can be drug money or stolen.
Having less large denomination bills onsite is also safer for the business because it makes them less prone to theft. Not having to make change for large bills means they can have less cash in the register.
An actual safety issue would be the amount of money in the drawers making a robbery more attractive. This is why convenience store and gas stations constantly remove cash from the drawers. Accepting 50 and 100 bills means having to keep more money in the drawer.
Everyone so far has said because of counterfeit, but that isn’t it. 100s and 50s are the most counterfeited *outside* the US. Inside, it’s the $20 bill that’s most counterfeited. Think about it; why would you counterfeit bills no one would take?
Counterfeiters don’t bother counterfeiting low-denomination bills (ones, fives) because
(a) why bother making a fake $1 bill when you can make a fake $100 bill that’s “worth” 100 times as much.
(b) If you spend $6 on a fancypants Starbucks coffee and pay with a *counterfeit* $100 bill, you’re going to get $94 *real* dollars back. If you pay with a counterfeit $10 bill, you’re only going to get $4 real dollars back. Better to turn your fake money into $94 than $4.
All of which means that high-denomination bills (hundreds, fifties, sometimes twenties) are *far* more likely to be counterfeit than smaller denominations.
So some businesses refuse to take them to avoid the financial risk.
Home depot accepts $100 bills. You will notice each register has a vacuum tube system or drop safes. They do multi-thousand dollar cash transactions all the time.
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