I accept that you’re right in your first paragraph, but I don’t understand why. Is it because politicians and voters don’t understand how inflation works? Surely they know that deflation is unhealthy. (IANA Economist: perhaps they know something about deflation that I don’t and are working to return the dollar to its 1950s value.)
Re: your second paragraph, Britain does quite well having a .2£ and .5£ coin, but I get the sense that changing the 1¢ / 5¢ / 10¢ / 25¢ set of coins is equally a harbinger of doom, but again I do not understand why.
How about—Behind the busker, there is a sign that says, Please send all contributions to dancer99@yahoo.com. A couple of clicks on your phone, instant transfer to her account. Hold the phone up towards her and nod. She nods back knowing that you’ve tipped her.
Australia got rid of 1 & 2 cent pieces years ago. And despite the prediction beforehand of doom and gloom, rain of fire, blah blah blah, nothing really changed.
Everything purchased with Cash is rounded to the nearest 5 cents. so 01 & 02 are rounded down, while 03 and 04 are rounded up. The rounding is only applied to the total of the transaction not individual items.
The rounding also only applies to cash transactions, if you’re using a card you are charged the actual amount.
There has been no “round all items of to something and 01 cent” to gain an incremental benefit to the store, on two points;
the rounding is applied to the total only,
the psychological benefit of the old trick of prices of x.99 still prevails.
I’m sure the hackers and signal interceptors will be very happy if/when we all go electronic. I mean, it’s not like businesses RIGHT NOW particularly care enough to protect customer information, even with lawsuit potential. Heck, they’ll probably write non-liability into their contracts.
As for the subject at hand, it doesn’t seem opaque or uniquely American to me. It’d be a big change for no immediate purpose that is readily apparent to the average Joe. That kind of thing doesn’t seem to be tailor-made for welcoming with open arms.
I originally saw something like that in Hong Kong. When the 10-baht coin first appeared in Thailand, it was worth maybe 25 US cents. Now it’s about 33 cents. But it was discovered that it was about the same size and weight as one of the euro coins, making it very handy for vending machines in Europe.
Any busker can instantly tell you what is wrong with this plan. She does the act, she sees people hitting a few buttons on the screen and holding the phone up to her. She is happy…until she checks the balance and finds out that nothing got transferred and they were just goofing on her. Also, I doubt very much that this will fee-less transfer, so any electronic coinage they do receive will certainly be less then they got before.
Pay the busker-pay the bank.
Pay the babysitter-pay the bank.
Pay the kid who mows the lawn-pay the bank.
And let’s not forget the biggie: Tip anybody-pay the bank.
Ironically, I find the Westward Movement nickels and the Lincoln Bicentennial designs the most attractive we’ve had on any coin for a long time. I particularly like the new buffalo nickel, as well as the one with the sailboat. If they could come up with a dollar like that it might fly.
Another issue is that we tend to be so insular, and after what looks like forty years of the dollar’s alarming weakness relative to, first, the major European currencies, and then to the Euro, is perceived to be just an American problem. Goldbugs and similar Chicken-Little types run about saying the sky is falling, because the dollar now is worth a twentieth of what it was in 1903–and never seem to acknowledge that this has happened just about everywhere else as well. In 1903 a pocketful of shillings was probably a week’s worth of pocket money for most UK citizens. But they don’t realize that, and our inflation is seen as a particularly American national shame.
I agree that the first three of the five-cent reverses are fine. Of course the buffalo design isn’t quite an original, but reference to a classic coin as well as an iconic American animal are all to the good here. The Lincoln reverses are hackneyed, especially the children’s-book Abe setting aside the axe to sit on a log and read a book. And I hate when images displace legends. The bottom edge of the reverse side is the correct and traditional place for the denomination in American coinage; graphic compositions should work with that, not against it.
Despite violating the straight-profile tradition (which is there for good compositional reason), the Sacajawea or “Native American” dollar is IMO a fine coin, certainly a better overall design than anything else mentioned here. I don’t think its circulating status has anything at all to do with its design.
