From the people who brought you Pocketful of Miracles, prepare for a new heart-warming holiday classic, G-String Full of Sackies.
(of course being a man’s man I’d prefer the stripper’s g-string contain a sackie than not, YMMV).
The obvious answer to not wanting to carry around a pocketful of sackies is to use them for your next cash purchase when you get them as change, instead of breaking 10s and 20s. I don’t find sackies or suzies to be all that terribly cumbersome when I have a couple in my pocket after buying stamps. If I have them on me sometimes I’ll use them as tips in restaurants or bars too, although I sometimes worry that the server will think I stiffed them with quarters.
In fact, the large dollar coin was discontinued in 1935 and not brought back until the Eisenhower dollar was introduced. That dollar was minted for only a few years, and phased out for lack of demand – only to be replaced by the widely unpopular Susan B. Anthony coin. Maybe the people were perfectly happy to have dollar coins “for most of the history of the United States” but not for most of the past 70 years.
Stick with the small coin and get rid of the bill.
When you get a suzie or sackie, spend it quickly and you won’t have to carry it! Spending will help the economy.
Come to think of it, why don’t we make coins out of spent nuclear fuel rods? It will solve our nuclear waste problem, people will want to spend them as fast as possible thus accellerating the economy, and it would give a whole new meaning to money “burning a hole in one’s pocket”.
In the northern tier states, you often see Canadian “loonies” and “toonies” (one and two-dollar coins). Both coins are about the size of the American half-dollar, and are visually distinctive.
When I’m traveling north of the border, I get quite used to receiving both in change from purchases, and think they’d work quite nicely here. The two-dollar coin keeps the amount of change in the pocket fairly reasonable.
But, you couldn’t do it without withdrawing George Washington from circulation, and I doubt they could get away with it.
(By the way…I was in Pennsylvania last week, and had a Canadian nickle refused at a coffee shop. In our part of the world, all vendors accept not only Canadian nickles, but loonies and toonies as well!)
Probably no great problem for them, because modifing the coin changer to accept a dollar coin is much cheaper than adding the 2nd set of equipment to accept a dollar bill. Also, the coin changers are more reliable and less likely to take a counterfeit than a bill-changer, especially with the growing availablilty of high-quality copiers & scanners.
The Vending industry would be quite happy to switch to accepting only coins, with no bill-changers at all. I’m sure they would prefer smaller coins that would fit in their current machines, but building the coin-changers larger to accept something the size of an Eisenhower silver dollar coin is quite feasable.
I kind of like the Sackies and use them when I have them. They never stay in my pocket change because POOF they’re spent! I do acknowledge that it is annoying that, being largely bronze, they tarnish to a dull barf-brown color within a year or so. Still, golden or barf-brown, they’re still visually distinctive.
As far as getting people to use them, I must concur with the opinion that you have to get rid of the $1 bill first. And that the problem with that is the emotional attachment everyone has to it. Still, I think it will eventually happen … due to security concerns. Over the last ten years the US currency was overhauled starting with the $20, going through all the bills … except the $1 and $2. Now we’re starting another round with a new $20, and we’ll probably see the same pattern. Eventually concerns about counterfeiters will force them to either overhaul the $1 or discontinue it altogether. And of course, no one cares about the $2, so they’ll discontinue it in a heartbeat. At this point there is a chance they’ll give up the dollar bill given that it would be too expensive to retool for the lowly denomination. Still, there is a LOT of inertia and emotion behind it, so common sense may not prevail …
The problem with getting rid of the $1 bill, as others have alluded to, is the fact that George Washington is on it. People would simply be against getting rid of Washington’s portrait (“He’s the father of our country!!!”), unless the Bureau of Engraving and Printing moved Washington to another denomination (we don’t need Jackson on the Twenty, do we?)
Personally, I’d like to see drastic redesigns to paper money; save the dead presidents for coinage and use other notable Americans for paper money. I’d also like to see color on our money, and more than the washed-out, sun-faded look of the new Twenty.
The reason they didn’t redesign the 1 dollar bill for more security is because no one is counterfeiting 1 dollar bills. Twenties are the smallest bill counterfeited. The trouble with counterfeit money is that you have to pass the money. How many things do you buy with cash nowadays?
If you are going to the trouble of counterfieting, you might as well end up with something worthwhile.
I too was disappointed to see that they didn’t circulate widely. I would try to get them at my bank, but they almost never were available. I did my best to circulate them for a while, but gave up as it was so hard to get them.
I don’t know why Americans are so fond of the dollar bill; it’s worth so little, and no other First World country prints paper in such a small denomination. Europe, Canada, and Australia have all made the shift to high-value coins, so why can’t we? Is the dollar so special? No! It’s worth about 60p, or 90 Eurocents, or somwhere between a loonie and a twonie. Taking paper money out of your wallet used to mean you were spending serious money. It didn’t mean, as it does now, that you were getting ready to pay the bus driver or buy a few stamps. Who are we kidding? Are we trying to delude ourselves that a dollar is really worth something, like it was in 1950? It’s like what you hear about in Third World countries, where you might have a sheaf of bills, each worth thousands of whatever, but the whole thing’s only worth 50 cents.
They get mostly tooth fairy usage in our household as well. My daughter ended up with A suzie not long ago and asked me without guile to exchange it for a Sacagawea.
But I like them, and their design did indeed solve the two Suzie problems - color and serrated edges - which caused confusion with quarters. I say kill the paper dollars and mint more Sackies.
It’s neat that they’re gold, but sort of ironic too. It reminds me of why a dollar coin is impractical: The only way us lazy, rich Americans would use them is if we had a leather sack and a donkey to haul them around with!
I recall a great deal of vocal unhappiness back in the late 80’s when the loonie was introduced and the dollar bill withdrawn from circulation. The general sense I get now is that people would be downright irate if they reverted to small bills. Really, the increased weight and volume of your change is minimal, and there are a great many benefits, like no more futile attempts to convince the vending machine that your tattered single is real money, and the joy of digging into your change and realizing you have 9 bucks in there.
I’m a bit confused by the cash drawer argument. We have 6 common coin denominations, and somehow retail outlets haven’t had to resort to keeping the toonies in a jar beside the till. Those plastic inserts must cost a couple bucks each. Imagine the horrible expense of changing them all. Why, your average Walmart would be out at least 40 bucks having to buy new ones!
I take it you all missed the enormous lobbying effort when the Sackie was first proposed. The industries that make the paper and ink for the dollar bill have a big-time gold mine on their hands and have no interest in losing it.
As stated you can’t have a bill and the coin. Try carrying around twenty dollars in one dollar bills or twenty dollar coins. In Chicago the EL system used to give them as change now they stopped giving change at all so the dollar coin vanished.
In fact on the CTA (Transit Chicago System) gives you one bonus dollar for every $10.00 you put on your card. I used to take my change and it used to allow you to put up to $5.00 worth of change on it then you could put a $5.00 bill and get $11.00 worth of rides. A great way to get rid of change. Now you can only put $1.90 max on the card in change. So even the Vendors don’t like change apparently.
I agree that there ARE 5 slots in the register. I have dealt with cash you don’t NEED to keep your spare rolls there. But cashier’s won’t give $1.00 coins back as customers don’t want them. So they do not circulate.
Actually, I also have a partially factual answer to this question, besides my minirant above. According to the person who maintains, or used to maintain www.coincoalition.com, the armored transporters also pretty much refused to handle the new coins, so that meant they simply didn’t get transported to a lot of places.
Which no doubt explains why my bank never had them.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Johnny L.A. *
**I do.
This is what I would do:
[ul][li]Make the dollar coin the size of the traditional dollar coin;[/li][li]Stop producing paper dollars;[/li][li]Let the vending machine companies deal with the change (on re-read, no pun intended) by making machines that will accept traditional-sized dollars, Suzies and sackies, paper dollars, and half-dollars.[/ul] **[/li][/QUOTE]
I agree with you on points 2 and 3, but you’ve got to be kidding on the first point. I’m all for the dollar coin in its smaller size, and to those who object to carrying a lot of coins I counter with the argument that they’re meant to be spent, so there’s no reason you should have to carry more than four dollar coins for any length of time. And four Sackies/Suzies is just not that much to carry. But you want to bring back the Ike dollar. Big, clunky cartwheels, one of which, as I keep saying, is almost enough to pay the bus driver or mail three letters. Do you really want to carry four of those around, and not even be able to buy a Number One Value Meal at Carl’s Jr. with them?
Now if we could agree to roll back prices, wages and salaries to their levels in the year 1950, then you might have something.
