I've only recently joined this forum and find these types of phenomenon interesting. There have been several accounts of visiting pubs and hotels etc but one of the things I find difficult to understand is how payment is accepted - in the UK certainly currency designs change quite frequently and as, for example, shops won't even accept the old one pound coin now I can't see how you wouldn't get pulled up when trying to pay?
On a slightly different tack, are there any accounts of someone being in a pub or restaurant in the present day and witnessing the arrival of anyone actually experiencing something like this i?
Good question, and one which I have pondered on at times. Here are the things I've come up with, just my thoughts:
Perhaps whatever 'state' causes the time slip to happen in the first place, possibly leaves all those who experience it (i.e. the person 'moving in time' and also anyone they interact with) in a sort of
dreamlike state whereby they drop their guard and don't carry out the normal 'logical checks' (for want of a better phrase) which would usually make them realise that the money is wrong, etc.
What about future dates on coins, I hear you ask? Well, just as on the rare occasion that someone has managed to bring something back with them (e.g. the man who bought celuloid (?) envelopes from a small shop in - I believe - Suffolk), and they started to become brittle not long after, then similarly perhaps the future money cannot sustain itself in the past, and quickly either disappears or becomes worn in some way such that the dates are indecipherable. That's even if the dates are checked at all.
Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that in the past, before the easy ability to 'check things on the internet' that a person serving behind a bar, or in a hotel, might take strange looking money to simply be foreign money (Which would also sort of explain how the exact amount isn't always handed over if the barkeep or hotel owner simply thought 'that'll do' and hoped it was an approximation of whatever foreign currency exchange rate would suit. It might also be how the person in the past explains away the odd clothing that the 'foreigner' is wearing.
Finally, is it possible that 'back in the day' shops and small businesses - moreso if they are small, family-run affairs outside the big cities - might not have been quite so strict with what coins and notes they did/did not allow; I'm thinking of the signs we see nowadays in shops saying "old ten pound note now replaced with new one", along with pictures, I'm sure you know the sort of thing I'm thinking about. Would this have even been a
thing at the turn of the last century, for example?
There endeth my rambling thoughts.