That’s what I do, too. I also arrange them in my pocket by size as you describe. The only drawback is that I eventually accumulate a load of small change that either needs to be spent or rolled and deposited.
BTW, whoever was asking about cash register trays, all the registers I’ve ever punched in the U.S. have five trays for both bills and coins.
All right, fine, but the question is, how did the Candadian strippers react to the change? While on stage do they only get tipped in American dollar bills?
This may call for field research at some strip clubs in Windsor. Any volunteers?
Jeez. All that talk about strippers and suddenly I can’t spell “Canadian” anymore.
I think the Kennedy halves failed for the same reasons that Sackies seem to be failing:[ol][]Vending machines don’t accept them.[]It simply doesn’t occur to most clerks to give them out as change.[/ol]
I’m so with you on this. People have to update their ideas about money. In the “Good Old Days” we hear about, when you
didn’t need a dollar and change to get on the bus, or a wad of dollar bills just to buy your lunch, a penny then was like a dime today, very roughly speaking. Yet no one ever seemed to say, "You know, what we really should do to protect consumers from price gouging, and to encourage charitable contribiutions, is to mint a 1/10-cent coin.
Or consider the usual complaints people have about change.
It’s too heavy in purses. It weights down pants, causing crack exposure in some cases. But it does this primarily because it is worth so little it isn’t worth the trouble. You go to the movies for example, and pay $6.50 for a ticket. You give the clerk a ten and get $3.50 in change. Popcorn and soda cost (let’s say) $6.50.
People are lined up behind you. Do you take the time to fish out the fifty cents and one of the singles the boxoffice clerk gave you? Probably not. Instead, you slap another ten on the counter and walk way with three more singles and two more quarters.
[rant]
Our entire monetary system, as it relates to minor purchases, works this way. At the end of the day you’ve got a wad of nearly worthless notes and a pile of nearly worthless change. And let’s not kid ourselves. The dollar is nearly worthless in comparison to what it used to be worth when pennies, dimes, and quarters were “invented”. And did our parents or grandparents, who could buy lunch for fifty cents or a newspaper for a nickel, let change “pile up”? You bet they didn’t. It was too valuable not to use,
so the heaviness of accumulating change wasn’t an issue. That’s the way money is supposed to be–compact, convienient, and suitable in value to the things one would normally expect to buy.
Recently one of the daily comics showed a wife pinning a note to her husband which read, “Please do not give this man any change. He leaves it in his pockets and in little piles all over the house.” That’s about it. Our currency system has become a joke.
[/rant]
:rolleyes: Wonderful idea, Fly. I can’t wait to buy a hamburger, fries, and coke with seventeen 25-cent notes. Hey wait, let’s do even better: We could print paper dimes and nickels, too. You could use a twenty to pay a $4 parking tab and the attendant might say, “I’m sorry sir, I only have five-cent notes for change,” and give you 320 bills. No, thanks. This is America, not Weimar Germany.
And don’t take it personally. This is the first time I’ve ever rolled my eyes here; I’ve wanted the U.S. government to move toward higher value coins, and eliminate the dollar bill for a very long time. I feel very strongly about it, and I have nothing to do with the vending machine industry.
What are you implying here? I have waited tables. You know what I hated? An apron full of quarters bouncing around the neighborhood of my family jewels. And what did we do about that when the load became too burdensome? We went to the cashier to “cash in” our change for 5’s, 10’s or 20’s.
All I see here is a benefit- instead of getting 12 quarters as a tip, you get 3 sackies. You have to go “cash in” less often. And when you do cash in, you’re only exchanging ten sackies for a ten dollar bill instead of forty quarters.
I love them. I get two rolls every payday at my credit union. Any business that staffs its registers with people untrained about what constitutes a legal means of exchange deserves to go without the patronage of those of us who are using sackies on a regular basis.
-revalue the currency! let’s make the new dollar worth 10 old dollars. So now, a dime is woth a dollar, a nickle 50 cents, and a penny is now the equivilent of 10 cents. Now, the government can issue new bills (say RED tinted, ISO green). This will catch the drug dealers and tax cheats red-handed! And, the old geezers can’t constantly regale us with their tales beginning …“in my day a dollar was WORTH something.”!
Why would you assume that getting 12 quarters is going to stop? If the dollar bill were eliminated, or sackies became sufficently popular, it’ll do NOTHING to decrease the supply of quarters. Now, you’ll still get all quarters from the people who would give you quarters, but the people who at one time would have given you a $3 tip in lightweight, easy to handle bills, will be giving you 3 more coins than you would have had before. You’ll be cashing in MORE often, not less often.
Plus, at the end of the night, when you and the other 6 servers go to tip out the bussers and service bartender, you’ll give each of them 3 or 4 bucks for a 4 hour shift. What does that leave them with? A whole pile of about 25 sackies, instead of a nice neat stack of 25 bills.
That’s what will happen. The introduction of the sackie won’t change the quarter into sackies. It’ll change the dollar BILL into sackies.
Oh, you mean in the esame way that you pay for lunch with 17 quarters? Or all those times that a parking attendant has said “Sorry sir. All I have for change today is nickels?” and gives you 320 nickels? Why would the conversion to paper do anything to change this? All it would do is make it easier to carry the change around.
If I’ve missed something in my logic that would make paper nickels more common than metal ones, I’d like to hear it. I honestly don’t see the logic in your argument.
Somehow they manage elsewhere in the world. I suppose one or two of the bill compartments get reassigned to hold coins.
In Germany, when I was there (late 70’s), there were 6 or 7 commonly circulating coins from the pfennig all the way up to five marks, and the German retail world has managed to survive. And I mean commonly circulating. You could expect to get any of these coins in change at any time–not like here where you never see anything above a quarter.
Hm… I agree with everybody! 
Seriously, though, I like coins for aesthetics, bills for ease of carrying. I do think that the worthless zinc coins we see now are a joke. Bills in those amounts would be instant kindling, & never worth the cost of production–the mint couldn’t afford to issue them. And the common dislike of coins (well, other than quarters–quarters are usually okay with people) probably stems more from them being worthless weight, than just the character of coins themselves.
When I worked a cash register, I honestly thanked people for giving me exact change, and would spend it myself when I could. I don’t like to see change only flowing in one direction from businesses to individual’s “change jars.”
Of course, I do accumulate some change anyway, but with the rise of 33c and 34c stamps, I find the post-office vending machines can accommodate me. I eventually discovered that a good way to get rid of excess pennies, nickels, & dimes was to put a couple dollar’s worth in the USPS vending machines (which accept and give as change pennies and dollar coins, besides the standard nickel-dime-&-quarter)–buy a stamp, and get back nice, shiny, relatively compact Sackies.
This occasional “Sackie Quest” amuses me. Yes, I now have a small hoard–which I’m theoretically saving for a Renaissance Faire, 'cos bills are so un-period. But I regretted not saving a few Susie B.'s when the Sackies came out–until recently, when, having spent my little stack of Sackies, I went looking for more–and got back Susies!!! Huh! they’re still in use, then. Well, they are the same size.
So now I have about seven of each sitting next to my state quarter collection, & if I don’t go to Renaissance Faire this spring, or I get short of cash, I may spend 'em at local businesses. But lately I’m mostly using bills.
As for the term “Golden Dollar”: I call them “brass dollars”, which is closer to the truth. They can fudge it and say, “It’s a copper alloy,” but I think they’re brass. Be nice if they found a way to stop 'em from turning green, though.
Lemur866 wrote:
Yeah, but it ain’t fair to compare the back of the new dollar coin with the back of the old quarter. You’ve gotta compare the back of the new dollar coin with the back of the old Susan B. Anthony dollar.
And the eagle on the back of the old Susie was “kewl”! It was a rendition of the Apollo 11 logo patch, with an eagle landing on the moon – the same logo that had previously appeared in a larger form on the back of the Eisenhower dollar coin.
I kinda prefer the eagle that’s on the back of the modern “gold American eagle” bullion coins myself.
I’m in the Sackie camp. If it saves money to make Sackies over bills then we need to move in that direction. Additionally, $/ounce they have a higher value density (I just made that up) than quarters. Sackies are easier to wash than a dollar bill. Better artwork. Noone will be making mushroom heads out of the coin.
Oh, it’s spelled Sacajawea by the way ( http://www.dollar-coin.nu/picked.html ).
Once upon a time, maybe. I think there was some early confusion over the spelling of the name back when the idea of the coin first came up. (Your link is pretty dated). But I think the spelling has been standardized to “Sacagawea” since then.
Here’s the U.S. Mint’s current calalog site, with the “Sacagawea” spelling
http://www.usmint.gov/catalog/
Here’s a link discussing the various spellings of the name:
Actually it fairly often happens that the parking attendant has only singles, and I subsequently have to stuff 16 or 17 singles in my wallet. I hate that.
The problem is that the quarter-bills would stack up in the same way that nickels and pennies do today. Twenty-five cents certainly doesn’t buy much today, so about the only way you could use them would be to make up the fractional part of a purchase price–much as we do with metal quarters today.
Only the trouble with that is, with the exception of the Sackie it’s becoming increasingly bothersome to handle any coins, because they’re worth so little. Rather than fish out 50 or 75 cents in quarters, plus any needed nickels or pennies, we tend to just break another dollar, which yields yet more change. The dollars themselves are getting bothersome as well, so we just break another five or twenty rather than take the time to fish out two or three singles from the last time we bought something. It would be the same, only much worse, with paper “quarters”.
You’re right; I’ve never walked into McD’s and use 17 quarters to pay for lunch, but it is a fact that change piles up. Eventually you have only four choices for dealing with your change. You can either: [/list][li]roll them up and take them to the bank, if you want to take the time, or []take them to one of those coin changers if you don’t mind the 9% they skim off the top, or[]take them to McD’s and buy your lunch with 17 quarters, or [*]you can keep them in the jar, which is a loss.[/list][/li]
The secret seems to be to provide appropriate denominations with respect to current prices; in the matter of coins they seem to work best when the denominations bear some reasonable relation to the things you’re likely to buy. The coins also need not to be too large or heavy. The inflation of the past 35 years has rendered our coins virtually obsolete. The coin changers I mentioned advertise that you can get “cash for coins”. See what I mean, coins aren’t even considered cash anymore. They’re just a nuisance. But the answer isn’t to get rid of them, but rather to introduce coins that bear some relationship to today’s prices, and eventually to downsize physically the smaller denominations. IMHO, a good rule is how much it costs to buy a simple lunch or a magazine. With Sackies you can do that with just three or four coins; but with quarters it takes a godawful handful. I don’t think Sackies will pile up; once the novelty wears off, people will just spend them as they need to. For most of us, they’re still worth enough that we will take them along rather than leave them in a jar at home. Incidentally, I do try to bring nickels and pennies along when I go out, so I can use them rather than get more and more everytime I buy something, but it’s really a hassle.
And in Germany, no one complained about the coins. They seemed to have just the right denominations and amounts of coins in circulation.
Oh sure, gotta love the 'ein pfennig’coin it’s more worse than a penny, in my opinion. I did a stint over there and I still have a pile of useless (in the U.S. anyway) german coinage. I liked the idea of a 5 Mark coin, (roughly $2.50) though, I could get snockered on a pocketful of change.
Maybe the ultimate answer to coinage problems is plastic, that is, stored value cards. Kind of like a debit card, it would make coins and cash obsolete. At least as long as we have electric power. Never mind.
Re the penny, someone mentioned “affection for Lincoln”. I don’t really think this is a factor, but if anyone feels it would be terrible not to have him represented on our currency, couldn’t we just put the guy on something else? A bill, or a higher value coin?
Here’s the real reason we can’t ditch the penny. The industury that sells the mint the metal used for pennies is constantly hard at work lobbying to keep the penny. They commission phoney surveys – that is, surveys where the wording of the questions is very carefully designed to elicit the desired response – that purport to prove that the public wants to retain the penny.
I agree that ditching the penny, while a good thing to do, is really only a step in the right direction. I agree with the idea of redesigning our currency to have coins that are actually worth something. Also, whatever new coins we create, we should disconintue any paper money of the same value.
Maybe we need coins worth 25 cents, 50 cents, one dollar, two dollars, and five dollars, with no folding money smaller then the ten. Or should there also be a coin worth something between two and five dollars?
Yeah…let’s do that…I would REALLY love to carry around two pounds of metal everywhere I go…geez…
If you want to send them to me, I’ll take 'em to the airport here - they have a foreign currency exchange! 