Trego's Mountain Ear

While our dollars say ‘legal tender’ on them, that doesn’t mean a store has to accept them. According to the Federal Reserve, all the term means is that a lender has to accept them as a form of debt repayment.

This last executive session, the Montana Legislature passed a bill requiring that US cash be accepted as currency, which was signed into law by the governor. Merchants that do not accept cash will be subject to a $100 fine per incident.

This still begs the question: Why is this even necessary? Looking into it suggests a of messy soup of definitions that a court will probably have to sort through at some point. A few thoughts:

• The Federal Reserve says “There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services” so, theoretically a store could insist on being paid in, say, chickens…
• Legal tender, as a concept, shows up in the argument over paper money, when the federal government started issuing it in order to deal with civil war debts
• There seems to be an insistence that as long as a merchant is accepting payment in dollars of some kind (like via a credit card), it doesn’t matter if they don’t accept it in another form