"Attention Best Buy Shoppers: Legal Tender No Longer Accepted Here!"

It seems that a Best Buy store in Baltimore had a customer arrested for paying a fee with $2 bills. The circumstances? The cashier, apparently unaware that there are millions of $2 Federal Reserve Notes circulating, thought they were counterfeit. The old saying is "phony as a $3 bill." Maybe the cashier misremembered, mentally twisting it to "phony as a $2 bill," but doesn't it seem likely that counterfeiters would fake actual denominations rather than make up nonexistent ones?

The customer in this case is the victim of an extreme example of poor customer service. Do you smell a possible lawsuit? I have a feeling the customer is going to experience a bit of a windfall after his lawyer and Best Buy's lawyers confer. Mostly, it makes no sense to sue when customer service goes awry. The costs to the economy of poor customer service are made up of millions of little snippets of wasted time and unnecessary frustation. It all adds up to big money, I'm sure. I wish I knew how much.

Hmm. The next time the McDonald's drive-through gets my order wrong I think I'll explore my options. Heck, one customer did just that because the coffee was too hot, and we know the rest of her story.