The Color of Money
You wake up one morning, drag yourself out of bed, and, bleary-eyed, throw on some clothes. You stumble out of your apartment and across the road to your neighborhood coffee shop. “Coffee, please,” you say to the barista, those being the only two words that you are capable of getting out of your system before you get some caffeine into it. She pours a cup of the coffee of the day and places it on the counter in front of you. Just smelling the coffee makes you feel a little bit better already. “That’ll be a dollar.” You reach into your pocket, pull out a crumpled twenty, hand it to her, and reach for the cup. “I’m sorry,” she says, pulling the cup away from you, “I can’t accept that.” “Why on earth not?” you ask, bemused. “It’s the wrong color,” she says. “You could have used that yesterday, but—look—this is what bills look like now.” And she reaches into her register and shows you a bright purple $20 bill, like the one in the following figure .
