Me No Understand New Money

The Treasury Department has invested in one of those spiffy "web sites" to hip Americans to the new $20 bills. Accessible from the site are a press kit, a fact sheet, and links to current TV spots, all of which are apparently predicated on the assumption that average citizens will be so flummoxed by the slightly new color scheme and minor redesign that they'll stare slack-jawed at the new bills the first time they receive them in change, turning them over and over in their hands, folding them into awkward shapes and attempting to use them to start their cars or shampoo their hair.

Comments

[Jessi Buchanan]

But Bill, you know it's true! You KNOW if they didn't saturate the media with messages about the new bills, a massive, collective "what the hell?" would rise up from the heartland. When the state quarters first came out a couple of years ago I actually witnessed a small child turned away from a concession stand because they thought it was a Canadian coin. They're going to think these new twenties are Iraqi!

[Bill]

yeah, you could be right... I tried to spend the only susan b. anthony dollar I ever saw and the guy looked at me like I talked about his sister. (I ended up getting rid of it in a vending machine at the post office, where I had received it in change, and which remains to this day the only place I ever saw the anthonys used as currency.)

[tina]

I did read somewhere the inital focus group involved the President...