From Deseret News archives:
'Surplus' dollar bills no bargain
Beneath the newspaper-layout-style headline is an article by Mary Beth Andrews of Universal Media Services, saying the World Reserve is "dumping its surplus of $3 million dollars of excess cash right in our back yards."
What does that sentence mean? Forget that "$" already means dollars and that a surplus is pretty much the same as an excess; how can any organization dump money?
The ad — for that is what it is, an ad and not really an article, one discovers by reading the relatively small print at the top of the page — is offering uncut pages of legal currency. For $1.09 you can purchase a sheet of four uncut $1 bills, whose face value is $4.
The company's spokesman, Steven Speakman, explained in the ad that it is the perfect gift for a rainy day, "because it will always be real money backed by the U.S. government and it will always have value."
The ad says World Reserve, a private company, is selling its own $3 million surplus "because it could not be returned to the U.S. Treasury."
Speakman is quoted as saying, "If times get tough you can actually cut the full sheets apart and spend them. But anyone would be foolish to cut them apart because they are already worth so much more as a sheet."
The ad explains that anyone who pays the transaction fee of $38 "gets all the cash they want at a fraction of its United States Treasury price."
That is true. The price of four uncut $1 bills, if the sheet is ordered directly from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, is $15.50. For the same sheet, World Reserve Monetary Exchange is charging only $1.09.
The bureau's cost includes shipping and there are no other charges. But to purchase the uncut sheet from the World Reserve, one also must purchase a $38 book to display the sheet.
Why not just buy the book while ordering 400 of the sheets? One might think that would cost $38 plus $436 for the uncut sheets, for a total of $474. The currency itself, meanwhile, is worth $1,600 — a windfall indeed, a $1,126 profit!
Alas, it doesn't work that way.
When a reporter called the ad's toll-free number and attempted to buy a display book plus 400 sheets of currency, the woman on the other end of the line said she would have to ask her supervisor about that. She returned to the phone, saying, "In order to get 400 sheets of the ones, you would have to buy 400 books to put them in, 'cause they come together."
The $1,600 worth of uncut currency would cost $15,636, counting the display books.
