Don’t the two-dollar bills wear out just as quickly as the one-dollar bills?
Yeah but you only need half as many of them. (Plus if you all used $1 coins like you’ve been told then you would need a lot fewer bills all round. 
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I don’t disagree that we should be using one-dollar coins. My preference would be to make the quarter-dollar the minimum coin size, add one- and two-dollar coins and make the five-dollar bill the minimum paper denomination.
That campaign was stupid. A better campaign would have shown someone at a vending machine trying to get it to accept his dollar bill. He’s entreatingly flattening it, yet the machine still keep spitting it out at him. At the next macing over, another guy (or since this is a commercial - a very attractive young woman) drops in her dollar coin, grabs her chips, and goes on her way.
We live in Canada, and my in-laws live in Florida. When we visit, I ask my father-in-law to request some $2 bills and dollar coins at his bank. Usually it is not a problem and I have spent them without incident (and only a couple of raised eyebrows).
The last time he got the currency for me the teller happily retrieved the bills and counted them out for him. She then commented that she hadn’t seen them before and asked “Can you use them?”
In Canada the $1 and $2 bills are still legal tender and I rarely see them. Retailers still accept them but seem to put them under the drawer instead of passing them on. When the bills are returned to the banks they are removed from circulation and destroyed. The same thing occurs to the old paper $50 and $100 bills, so that only the new style are distributed from the banks.
I read a similar story about the Secret Service investigating Steve Wozniak for counterfeit bills. He bought some of those sheets of uncut $2 bills and had them perforated and made into pads. When he tipped a waitress, he’d just pull out a pad and tear off a few bills.
Cite? I never heard a word about older bills being demonetized. Moreover it is totally unnecessary. Just getting the banks to remove them from circulation is enough. They wear out. The loonies and toonies (twonies?) are well accepted by now.
I will be very happy to get rid of the penny and would be happier without the nickel. There is a problem with the latter. When they lose the penny, merchants will be told to round up or down whichever is closer. And sales taxes and credit cards will still be to the cent. But losing the nickel doesn’t offer much opportunity for rounding. And the dime and quarter are incommensurable. It would best to also drop the quarter and also put lots of halves into circulation.
But I would prefer to simply revise the whole coinage system. If the penny, nickel and quarter are to be dropped, it will give the opportunity to make all the remaining coins smaller. So the loony and toony will be lighter in the pocket.
One major problem with $2 paper bills is cash register drawers. There isn’t any room for them. I work a cash register occasionally and there isn’t room for the $50 and $100 bills I get. In one year of working a register, I have yet to see a $2. I do see $1 coin bills occasionally because customers tell me that the vending machines for the New York City subway system give them out when you buy a ticket for them. But, yeah, I do stare if I get a coin with Rutherford B Hayes on it, thinking is this legal or Monopoly game money.
The only time I ever got a $2 Jefferson bill was when I was in boot camp in the late 1970s. In the military you get paid twice a month and they didn’t want a bunch of recruits to get the whole paychecks of out tremendous $218 (before taxes) checks. So they would give us something like $42, with the $2 to be a $2 bill to buy necessary items at the exchange like razor blades, soap, etc.etc.
quite a few vending machines accept dollar coins, so the current ones are deliberately made the same size as the Susan B. so vending machines will accept them.
I’d heard this too - that when the townies became too abusive, we’d be paid in $2 to show them how much of their business depended on us.
In the US, we received a standard govt. check: yellowish with the Statue of Liberty, same as Social Security and tax refund checks. Overseas we had to line up in front of a table while a supply officer and his clerk paid us in cash, under the baleful gaze of a master-at-arms wearing a Colt M1911 on his hip. But there were never $2*.
*2/5 the cost of a standard blowjob in the Phillippines. Same in Tijuana, but you paid another $5 for her tequila after-rinse.
My understanding is that vending machine companies want dollar coins because they are easier to deal with than paper (e.g. for returning change).
:rolleyes: This argument always irks me. The Treasury Department is our servant, not our master. If the US public doesn’t want dollar coins (at attitude which I think has been well established by the repeated failure of the coins to gain any traction) then the Mint should just take the hint and give it up, already.
Yes, which creates a self-perpetuating cycle. Retailers don’t set up drawers for them because they don’t get them often … should one get into circulation, it goes out of circulation because the retailer doesn’t have a drawer set up for it, so they stick it under the tray, and it goes directly back to the bank. Once or twice I’ve tried the experiment of getting a bunch of $2 bills from the bank and passing them to watch the reactions. I usually found they were recognized with no problem, but they DID get immediately stuffed underneath the cash tray.
There’s all sorts of folklore concerning $2 bills and why they are unpopular, of course. There’s no similar folklore concerning $50 bills, and you tend to see those less often than the $100 (which you do see occasionally). We don’t seem to want to use the fifty either. One factor there might be that many retailers have decided that the $20 bill is the “large bill” cutoff, and won’t take any larger denominations. If you are going to get large bills, they might as well be $100 then. You’re only going to be able to break them at certain places either way.
It’s been well-established, it’s just unfortunate. Everything I’ve ever read indicates that getting rid of dollar bills in favor of dollar coins would save the U.S. government a non-inconsiderable amount of money. But, people whine about the change, people insist it would be “too expensive” to change*, people place a patriotic importance to the dollar bill, and many Americans seem to instinctively have a negative reaction to “it worked well in {other country}”. It irks me that a good idea gets derailed because of that foolishness, especially when I suspect that a lot of the anti-dollar-coin whiners are the same people who want to cut government spending.
- – I was up in Canada this past summer, and saw a cash register drawer in a store which had been “retrofit” for “loonies” and “toonies”. They’d taped a coin bin into the slot where dollar bills used to go. Net cost was probably $2.
I don’t get why people want dollar coins. I hate having coins in my pockets. They’re just one more thing to get entangled with either my headphone or keys, depending on which pocket I have them in. The moment I get home they get put in my “hookers and blow” jar until I take them to Coin Star.
Dollar bills are awesome though. They fold up perfectly in my wallet.
I would fain tell out coins to the merchants who enjoy my custom, yet they leave me prey to cutpurses in the marketplace, therefore I eschew them.
(plus, now that you hardly see any organ grinders and monkeys, what’s the point of carrying pennies when there’s no reason to make one red-hot with a match?)
coins last for decades. bills last for months. Can’t see how that might save some money?
and it’s not so much that I “want” dollar coins, it’s that I’d have no problem using them if it’s what we had.
that all depends on if they failed because people didn’t want them, or because they were given no incentive to use them.
What I wish we WOULD consider is polymer bills which wear better. Several other countries use them. Yeah, I know, the BEP crumple test …
Can’t forget this tale from the dawn of the Internet:
(Includes the Best Buy story, above).
The other big difference between paper and coin dollars is that the Treasury can make a profit off making coins but not on paper. The Fed buys paper money for just the cost of producing it (i.e. materials plus labour) but it buys coins at their face value*. So aside from being longer lived, a dollar coin would also net the Treasury dept. a few extra billion a year in funding.
*(this is also why they churn out all those different quarter designs. Collectors create larger demand for more quarters, which nets Treasury a couple extra hundred million a year.)