Originally Posted by
yzb25
Going to seriously entertain this idea.
There would certainly be a demand for that sort of business, especially if some sort of advertisement campaign was shoved down people's throats about how dirty notes spread "nu swine flu" or some other hip paper-based disease.
Sadly however noone's going to go specifically shopping for clean notes from a supermarket, unless they're really OCD. But I suppose the bank could probably run such a business with ease, and a button could be added to credit card machines which prints "unused" notes. In fact, they could make "clean notes" the default setting and force you to click extra buttons with a warning message if you specifically pursue "dirty" notes.
^^In that situation, I can imagine a lot of people paranoid about their health (particularly the elderly) going along with it "just to be safe, anyway". In the same way people arbitrarily prefer mineral water "just in case all those ads ARE true", even though a google search tells you 30% of mineral water sold in the UK comes from the tap.
It would be cheap, too. As long as the bank ensures the paper "feels" new, it doesn't even actually have to be new. If we've just made up the standards for what constitutes a "clean note" we can make it whatever we want, in the same way there's no legal definition of what "mineral water" needs to be.
Sadly, I think this brilliant idea has come 30 years too late though. The internet will bite back and humiliate such a business and may even make it "uncool" to get such a note. If this idea predated the internet and predated the time where credit cards were prevalent EVERYWHERE (and contactless, which literally makes a card payment quicker than cash anyway) this could have been a good idea.