Hey, Episode 0 is finally here! Thanks so much for tuning in and checking us out! Normally I will interview a different bartender every week, but in this episode I’m just at home hanging out with my dog (see photo), and I wanted to briefly introduced myself and the show, and share a story about how I poorly handled a situation with counterfeit money. You can find Episode 0 in the player below or you can subscribe to the You’re 86 Podcast on this page or wherever podcasts are found.
Since I already introduced the show in the previous welcome post, I’ll just dive right into the intricacies of counterfeit currency in this post. What do you do about counterfeit money? Definitely not what I did, listen and read on to find out more.
Counterfeit currency is an unfortunate issue that we sometimes have to deal with in our industry. The United States Secret Service, which was originally formed to combat counterfeiting, reported that more than 73 million counterfeit US dollars were prevented from circulation in 2017 alone. Although maybe not the most common situation to arise at our bars, it’s important to know what we should do if it does. I certainly didn’t know what to do when I found myself in a counterfeit money situation when I was working at a bar called The Interval in San Francisco. I’ll tell you what I did, then what was wrong about it and what to do better next time.
Here’s what happened to me
It was around 5:30 pm on a summer Thursday night. I was in our little prep room in the back of the bar washing glassware or something when my coworker came in and told me there was a customer making her very uncomfortable and asked if I could handle it. Of course I was happy to help her, but wasn’t sure what I was about to get into.
I went out to the front and found an extremely nervous looking, balding, middle-aged man in a fleece vest standing near the POS. I cheerfully asked him how he was doing and what I could get for him. He was so nervous and awkward that he could barely respond, but he managed to order a cup of tea(which cost $4, the second cheapest drink on the menu).
